Siberian Education

Ksyusha

Ksyusha was a very beautiful girl with typical Russian features. She was tall, blonde, shapely, with freckles on her face and eyes of a dark, deep blue.

She was the same age as me, and she lived with her aunt, a good woman whom we called Aunt Anfisa.

Ksyusha was a special friend of mine.

I remember the day I first saw her. I was sitting with my grandfather, on the bench. She was walking towards our house with her slightly timid yet at the same time strong and decisive step: she seemed like a wild animal padding through the woods. When she approached, my grandfather looked at her for a moment and then said, as if speaking to someone I couldn’t see:

‘Thank you for sending another angel into the midst of us sinners.’

I realized that she was a ‘God-willed’ child, as our people say, one who in other places would simply have been called mad.

She suffered from a form of autism, and had always been like that.

‘She has suffered for us all, like Our Lord Jesus Christ,’ my grandfather told me. I agreed with him, not so much because I understood the reason for Our Lord’s suffering, but simply because I had learned that in my family, in order to survive and have some chance of prospering, it was essential always to agree with Grandfather, even in cases which exceeded the limits of the intellectual faculties, otherwise no one would get anywhere.

Since my childhood I had been surrounded by handicapped adults and children, such as my close friend Boris, the engine driver, who met the tragic end that I have already described. Many mentally ill people lived in our area, and they kept coming to Transnistria until the 1990s, when the law against keeping the mentally ill at home was abolished.

Now I realize that Siberian culture developed in me a profound sense of acceptance towards people who outside my native society are described as abnormal. But for me their condition was simply never an anomaly.

I grew up with mentally ill people and learned many things from them, so I have come to the conclusion that they have a natural purity, something you cannot feel unless you are completely freed of earthly weight.

Like many God-willed children and adults, Ksyusha was a frequent visitor to our house: she entered and left whenever she wanted; sometimes she stayed until late at night, when Aunt Anfisa would come to fetch her.

Ksyusha was expansive, and could be positively garrulous. She liked to tell everyone the latest news she’d managed to gather.

She had been brought up by the criminals, so she was aware that the cops were the baddies and the people who lived in our district the goodies, and that we were all one family.

This fact had created an atmosphere of protection around her, and she felt free to live her life as she wanted.

Even when she was older, Ksyusha continued to come into our house as freely as before: without asking anyone’s permission she would start cooking whatever she liked, or she would go out into the vegetable garden to help my aunt, or stay indoors to watch my mother knitting.

Often she and I would go up onto the roof, where my grandfather kept his pigeons. She liked the pigeons very much; when she saw how they walked about and ate, she would laugh and stretch out her hands, as if she wanted to touch them all.

Together with my grandfather we used to fly them. First Grandfather would take a female pigeon, small and poor of colour and feather, and throw her; she would start to rise into the air, and would fly higher and higher, and when she became as small as a dot in the sky Grandfather would pass one of us a big strong male with a rich, glossy plumage, an absolutely beautiful pigeon. At Grandfather’s signal we would throw this second, larger pigeon upwards, and he would rise towards the female, turning somersaults in the air to attract her attention. He would beat his wings hard, making a sound like the clapping of hands. You should have seen how Ksyusha laughed at that moment; she was the real beauty.

She liked to imitate Grandfather’s gestures and phrases. When she saw a handsome new pigeon she would put her hands on her chest just as Grandfather Boris did, exactly like him, and in a tone of voice identical to his she would say, as if she were singing:

‘What a miracle of a pigeon this is! It has descended straight from God!’

We would all burst out laughing at the way she succeeded in catching Grandfather’s manner and the peculiarities of his Siberian pronunciation; and she would laugh with us, realizing that she had done something clever.

Ksyusha didn’t have any parents, or any other relatives; her aunt wasn’t a real aunt – she let herself be called that for simplicity’s sake. Aunt Anfisa had a past as a klava or zentryashka or sacharnaya: these terms in criminal slang denote a female ex-convict who after her release settles down with the help of the criminals, finds a normal job and pretends to live an honest life, so as to deflect the attention of the police from herself. To criminals in difficulty – guys on the run from the police, say, or escaped convicts – such women are a means of support in the civil world; it is thanks to them that they communicate with their friends and obtain help. These women, who are clean and above all suspicion, are highly respected in the criminal world and often run secondary criminal affairs, such as black marketeering or selling stolen goods. According to the criminal law they cannot marry, because they are and must remain the brides of the criminal world. The former USSR is full of these women: people say of them that they haven’t got married because they had some bad experience with men in the past, but the truth is different. They live in isolated spots, outside town, in quiet areas; inside their apartments there is no trace of that world to which they are closely and inextricably linked. The only visible sign of their identity might be a faded tattoo on some part of the body.

The addresses of these women don’t appear in any directory, and in any case it’s no use simply knowing who they are – you must be sent by someone, by an Authority. They will never open the door to you if they haven’t been forewarned of your arrival, or if they don’t recognize the signature on your arm.

Before moving to Transnistria, Aunt Anfisa had lived in a small town in central Russia, and occasionally put criminals up in her flat. They would go to her house as soon as they got out of prison, partly just to spend some time with a woman who was capable of loving as a criminal was used to being loved, and partly to inquire about the whereabouts of their friends, find out what was going on in the criminal world and ask for help in their new life.

One evening Aunt Anfisa was visited by a fugitive whom the police had been hunting for some time. He and the rest of his gang had carried out several bank robberies, but one day something had gone wrong and the police had succeeded in catching them at it. A violent chase had ensued, and the criminals, as they fled and endeavoured to throw the cops off the scent, had shared out the loot and split up. Each had gone his own way, but, as far as Anfisa knew, only two of them had managed to get away; the other six had been killed in clashes with the police. The group had killed more than twenty officers and security guards, so as far as the police were concerned it had been a matter of pride not to let any of the robbers escape, and to give them all an exemplary punishment, so as to deter other people from doing the same.

This fugitive turned up at Anfisa’s house with a baby girl, who was only a few months old. He explained to her that his original plan, to escape via the Caucasus, Turkey and Greece, had never even got off the ground: the police had burst into his flat, and one officer had killed his wife, the child’s mother; but he had made his escape, and now had come to Anfisa’s house, sent by a friend.

He left Anfisa his little girl – along with a bag full of money, a few diamonds, and three ingots of gold – and asked her to take care of the child. She agreed, and not only because of the money: Anfisa couldn’t have children herself, and like any woman who longs for children, had found the prospect irresistible.

The man told her that if she wanted a quiet life she would have to disappear. He advised her to go to Transnistria – to the town of Bender, a land of criminals, where he had the right connections and where no one could find her and harm her.

That same night Anfisa, with a bag full of money and food and with the little girl in her arms, had left for Transnistria. Later she heard the child’s father had been killed in a shoot-out with the police while trying to reach the Caucasus.

Anfisa didn’t know what the little girl was called: in all the confusion the man had forgotten to tell her his daughter’s name. So she had decided to give her the name of the patron saint of parents, Saint Ksenya: or ‘Ksyusha’, as we called her affectionately.

Right from the start Anfisa had understood that Ksyusha was different from other children, but that never stopped her being proud of her: they had a wonderful relationship, those two – they were a true family.

Ksyusha was always going off on her own, all over the place, and wherever she went she found open doors and people who loved her.

Sometimes her autism was more obvious than usual: all of a sudden she would freeze and stand motionless for a long while, gazing into the distance, as if concentrating on something a long way off. Nothing, it seemed, could wake her or bring her back to her senses. Then she would suddenly come out of that state and resume whatever she had been doing before.

There was an old doctor who lived in our area, who had a theory of his own about Ksyusha and her moments of absence.

He was an excellent doctor, and a man who loved literature and life. He lent me a lot of books, especially ones by American authors who were banned in the Soviet Union, and also some uncensored translations of European classics, such as Dante.

Under Stalin’s regime he had been put in a gulag for hiding in his apartment a family of Jews who, like many Jews in those years, had been declared enemies of the people. Since he had collaborated with ‘enemies of the people’ he had been given a harsh sentence, and like many political prisoners during that period, had been sent to a gulag together with ordinary convicts, who hated political prisoners. Already on the train journey to the camp he had made himself useful to the outlaw community by setting the broken bones of an important criminal who had been savagely beaten by the soldiers on guard. In the camp he had been officially declared a lepíla, or doctor of the criminals.

After several years in the gulag he had developed such a close relationship with the criminal community, despite not being a criminal himself, that when he was released he no longer felt he belonged to the civilized world. So he decided to go on living in the criminal community, and therefore had come to Transnistria, to our district, where he had a friend.

This doctor was a very interesting individual because he was a complicated character of many layers: a physician, an intellectual who had preserved the taste and refinement of a person with a university education, but also a man with a past as a convict, a friend of criminals, whose language he spoke fluently and whom he resembled in almost every respect.

On the question of Ksyusha he used to say it was very important not to disturb her when she was motionless, but that one thing in particular was essential: when she returned to her senses, everything around her must be just as it had been at the moment of separation.

So we boys knew we mustn’t touch her when she went into that state. We knew this, and we tried as hard as we could to protect our Ksyusha from any possible shock, but as often happens among youngsters, sometimes we overdid things in our attempt to follow the doctor’s advice.

Once, for example, we were out in a boat. There were three of us plus Ksyusha and we were going upstream along the river when suddenly the motor conked out. We put the oars into the water, but after a few minutes I noticed that Ksyusha had changed: she was sitting with her back erect and her head quite still, like a statue, and staring at the unknown… So we, poor fools, started frantically rowing against the current, because we were scared that if on Ksyusha’s reawakening the scenery around her was different, her health would be seriously affected.

We rowed like mad for almost an hour; we took turns but were still exhausted. People watched us from the bank, trying to make out what these idiots were doing on a boat in the middle of the river, where the current was strongest, and why they kept rowing against the current in order to stay in the same position.

When Ksyusha woke up we all gave a sigh of relief and we went straight home, though she kept asking us to go on a little further…

We thought the world of our Ksyusha; she was our little sister.

When I was released from prison after my second juvenile conviction, I went wild for a week. Then I spent a whole day in the sauna: I fell asleep under the hot steam, perfumed with pine essence, which pinned me to the boiling hot wooden bed. Afterwards I went fishing with my friends.

We took four boats and some large nets, and travelled a long way: we went upriver as far as the hills, where the mountains began. There the river was much wider – sometimes you couldn’t see the opposite bank – and the current was less strong. A whole plain scattered with small pools among wild woods and fields, and a scent of flowers and grass carried on the wind; when you breathed it you felt you were in heaven.

We fished at night and relaxed by day; we would build a fire and make fish soup or fish baked in the earth, our favourite dishes. We talked a lot: I told the others what I had seen in jail, the everyday stories of prison, the people I had met and the interesting things I had heard from others. My friends filled me in on what had happened in our area while I’d been in prison: who had left, who had been put inside, who had died, who had fallen ill or disappeared, the troubles in our part of town and the conflicts with people from another area, the quarrels that had broken out during my absence. Someone talked about his previous conviction, someone else about what he’d heard from his relatives who had returned from jail. That’s how we spent the days.

About ten days later we returned home.

I tied my boat to the jetty. It was a beautiful day – warm, even though a bit windy. I left everything in the boat – the bag containing my soap, toothbrush and toothpaste. I even left my sandals there: I wanted to walk with nothing to encumber me. I felt good, as you feel when you’re aware of being really free.

I set my eight-gored hat askew on the right side of my head and put my hands in my pockets, my right hand touching my flick-knife. I picked a sprig from an aromatic herb on the river bank and clenched it between my teeth.

And so, barefoot in the company of my friends, at a relaxed pace I set off for home.

Already in the first street of our district we realized that something was wrong: people were coming out of the houses, the women with little children in their arms were walking behind the men, and an immense line of people had formed. Following the crowd and increasing our pace we caught up with the end of the queue and immediately asked what had happened. Aunt Marfa, a middle-aged woman, the wife of a friend of my father’s, replied with a very scared, almost terrified expression on her face:

‘My sons, what a dreadful thing has befallen us, what a dreadful thing… The Lord is punishing us all…’

‘What’s happened, Aunt Marfa? Has somebody died?’ asked Mel.

She looked at him with a grief-stricken expression on her face and said something I’ll never forget:

‘I swear to you by Jesus Christ that even when my son died in prison I didn’t feel so bad…’

Then she started crying and muttering something, but it was incomprehensible; we only caught a few words, ‘residue of an abortion’ – a very bad insult for us, because as well as offending the person who is called that it offends the name of the mother, who according to Siberian tradition is sacred.

When one woman, a mother, insults the name of another mother, it means that the person at whom that insult is aimed has done something really horrible.

What was going on? We were bewildered.

On top of that, a few seconds later all the women in the procession started screaming, crying and uttering curses together with Aunt Marfa. The men, as Siberian law prescribes, let them scream but kept calm themselves: only the angry expressions on their faces, and the narrow slits of their eyes, near-closed with rage, indicated their state of mind.

Uncle Anatoly came over to Aunt Marfa. He was an old criminal who as a young man had lost his left eye in a fight and was consequently nicknamed ‘Cyclops’. He was tall and sturdy and never wore a bandage over that hole where his eye had once been: he preferred to show everyone that terrible black void.

Cyclops had the job of looking after Aunt Marfa and taking care of her family, while her husband, who was his best friend, was in jail. That’s the custom among Siberian criminals: when a man has to serve a long prison sentence, he asks a friend, a person he trusts, to help his family to make ends meet, check that his wife doesn’t cheat on him with another man (something almost impossible in our community) and watch over his children’s upbringing.

Embracing Aunt Marfa, Cyclops tried to calm her down, but she kept on screaming louder and louder, and the other women did the same. So the little children started crying too, and then the slightly older ones joined in.

It was hellish: I felt like crying myself, though I still didn’t know the reason for all this despair.

Cyclops looked at us, and realized from our faces that nobody had told us yet. He murmured in a sad and angry voice:

‘Ksyusha’s been raped… Boys, this is a world of bastards!’

‘Be quiet, Anatoly, don’t make Our Lord even angrier!’ said Grandfather Filat, a very old criminal whom everyone called ‘Winter’, though I never understood why.

It was said that when he was a boy Filat had robbed Lenin himself. He and his gang had stopped a car carrying Lenin and some senior members of the party on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Lenin, the story went, had refused to hand over his car and money to the robbers, so Winter had hit him on the head, and the shock had given Lenin his famous tic of involuntarily turning his head to the left. I was always very sceptical about this story – goodness knows how much truth there was in it – but it was amusing to see grown people telling these tales in the belief that they were true.

Anyway, Winter was an old Authority, and whenever he expressed his opinion everyone took notice. It was his job to rebuke Cyclops, because he had spoken too angrily, blurting out blasphemies which a well-bred Siberian criminal should never utter.

‘Who are you, my boy, to call this world “a world of bastards”? It was created by Our Lord, and there are plenty of just men in it too. Surely you wouldn’t want to insult all of them? Mind your words, because once they have flown they never come back.’

Cyclops hung his head.

‘It is true,’ went on Grandfather Filat, ‘that a great misfortune and injustice has befallen us; we have failed to protect the angel of Our Lord, and now He will make us pay for it. Perhaps you yourself will be given a long prison sentence tomorrow, someone will be killed by the cops, someone else will lose his faith in the Mother Church… Retribution awaits us all, for we all share in the sin. I too, old as I am, will be punished in some way. But now is not the time to lose our heads; we must show the Lord that we are attentive to His signals, we must help Him to accomplish his justice…’ The rest of Winter’s speech I missed, because I had dashed off towards Ksyusha’s house.

All the doors and windows were wide open.

Aunt Anfisa was wandering around the house like a ghost: her face was white, her eyes swollen from weeping, her hands shaking so much they transmitted their tremor to the whole of the rest of her body. She didn’t scream or say anything; she just kept emitting a long-drawn-out whine, like that of a dog in pain.

To see her standing in front of me in that state scared me. I was paralysed for a moment, then she came towards me and with her trembling hands clutched my face. She looked at me, weeping, and whispering something whose meaning I couldn’t understand. At the same time, I couldn’t hear anything; in my ears there was a growing noise like a whistle, like when you swim underwater, going further and further down. I had a violent headache; I closed my eyes, squeezing my temples as hard as I could, and at that moment I understood the question Aunt Anfisa kept whispering to me:

‘Why?’

Simply a short, sharp ‘Why?’

I felt sick; I had lost all sensation in my feet. I lost all my strength; it must have been obvious I wasn’t well, because as I tried to walk to Ksyusha’s room I noticed two of my friends holding me up with their arms round my waist, gripping my elbows. Step by step I realized I was swaying, as if drunk; a new pain had appeared in my chest, I felt a weight in my heart and lungs, and couldn’t breathe. Everything was whirling around me; I tried to focus my gaze, but the carousel I had in my head was going faster, ever faster… suddenly, though, I managed to catch the image of Ksyusha. It was blurred, but shocking in its very imprecision: she was lying on the bed like a newborn baby, with her knees tucked right up to her face and her arms wrapped around them. Closed, completely closed. I wanted to see her face, I wanted to stop my head spinning, but I couldn’t control myself; I saw a bright light and lost consciousness, falling into the arms of my friends.

I woke up outside in the yard, with my friends standing around me. One gave me some water to drink; I got to my feet and at once felt well, strong, like after a long rest.

Meanwhile the people had filled the yard; there was a long queue leading back to the gate and out into the street. Everyone kept asking Aunt Anfisa’s forgiveness; the women kept weeping and screaming curses at the rapist.

I was obsessed by a single thought: that of finding out who could have done such a thing.

Our friend, ‘Squinty’ – who owed his nickname to the fact that he’d been cross-eyed as a child, though his sight had later corrected itself – came over to us boys and told us Grandfather Kuzya was expecting us all at his house for a chyodnyak, which is a kind of big meeting between criminals of all levels, attendance at which is compulsory, even for children.

We asked him if he knew who had raped Ksyusha, and how it had happened.

‘All I know,’ he said, ‘is that two women from our area found her in the Centre district. Near the market. Lying among the rubbish bins, unconscious.’

As a sign of respect, these meetings are always held in the houses of old criminals who have tied the knot: thanks to their experience they are able to give valuable advice, but since they have retired and no longer have any responsibilities they are in a sense not involved. The holding of meetings in houses that are not their own enables all criminals who hold a certain responsibility to say what they think without being bound by the law of hospitality, whereby the master of the house must avoid contradicting his guests. In this way they can debate freely without having to be absurdly evasive and indirect.

When we reached Grandfather Kuzya’s house, the door was wide open, as usual. We went in without asking for permission. This too is a rule of good behaviour: you must never ask an old Authority for permission to enter his house, because according to his philosophy he has nothing of his own – nothing belongs to him in this life, only the power of the word. Not even the house he lives in is his: he will always tell you he is a guest. Grandfather Kuzya, as a matter of fact, really was a guest, because he lived in the house of his younger sister, a nice old lady, Grandmother Lyusya.

There were many criminals of Low River in the house, including my Uncle Sergey, my father’s younger brother. We greeted those present, shaking hands with them and kissing them three times on the cheeks, as is the custom in Siberia. Grandmother Lyusya invited us to sit down and brought us a large jar of kvas. We waited until everyone had arrived, then our Guardian, Plank, gave the sign that we could begin.

The aim of these meetings is to solve difficult situations in the area in such a way that everyone agrees with the solution and everyone contributes in whatever way they can.

As I have already mentioned, each area has a Guardian. He is responsible to the highest Authorities, who never participate in meetings like this, for the application of the criminal laws. The Guardian’s job is a very difficult one, because you always have to keep abreast of the situation in your area, and if anything serious happens the Authorities ‘ask’ you, as the phrase runs in criminal slang – that is, they punish you. Nobody ever says ‘punish’; they say ‘ask’ for something. Asking can be of three kinds: mild, which is called ‘asking as if one were asking a brother’; more severe, which is called ‘putting a frame round someone’; and definitive and very severe, which changes the criminal’s life decidedly for the worse, if it does not actually eliminate it at the root, and is called ‘asking as if one were asking the Gad’.[10]

The old Authorities don’t usually resolve individual problems themselves; that is the purpose of the Guardian, who is chosen by them and in a sense represents them, at least as long as he behaves properly. But if the situation is difficult and beyond his abilities, the Guardian may appeal to an elder and, in the presence of witnesses chosen from among the ordinary criminals, present the case without mentioning the names of the people involved. This is done to guarantee impartiality of judgement; if the Guardian dares to name someone, or in some way makes it clear who the person is, the elder can punish him, withdraw from the case himself and pass it on to another, usually a person distant from him, with whom he has few connections. The purpose of this is to ensure that the process of criminal justice is as impartial as possible: it focuses solely on the facts of the case.

Clearly, when something happens the Guardian has a strong incentive to clear it up quickly and effectively, so as not to allow the case to become too complicated and not to involve the Authorities.

Plank was an old robber who had been brought up in the old way. To open the meeting he gave a Siberian greeting, as is customary among our people, which consisted in thanking God for making it possible for everyone to attend.

He spoke slowly in a very deep voice, and we listened to him. Every now and then someone would heave a sad sigh, to emphasize the gravity of the situation we were faced with.

The gist of Plank’s speech was simple – something very serious had happened. Any act of violence against a woman is inadmissible for the Siberian criminal community, but an act of violence against a God-willed woman is an act of violence against the entire Siberian tradition.

‘You have one week,’ he concluded, looking at us boys. ‘You must find the culprit – or culprits, if there were many – and kill them.’

The task was our responsibility. Since Ksyusha was below the age of majority, the rules of our district decreed that other juveniles must make the inquiries and carry out the final execution.

They wouldn’t just leave us to ourselves – on the contrary, they would give us a lot of help – but we alone must appear before the other communities, to show how our law worked.

It’s the Siberian rule: adults never do something which concerns juveniles – they can help, advise and support them, but it is up to the youngsters to act. Even in our fights no adults get involved, whereas the boys of the other districts can call adults in as reinforcements. In Siberia an adult will never dare to raise his hand against a juvenile, otherwise he loses his criminal dignity, and at the same time the juvenile must keep to his place and not bother the adults.

In short, to demonstrate to others that our law is strong, we Siberian boys must show that we can look after ourselves.

‘First of all, you will go from district to district in search of information,’ Plank told us. ‘And this will be useful to you,’ he concluded, handing us a parcel of money. It was ten thousand dollars, a very large sum.

The meeting was over, and with the blessing of our pack we could now leave for the town.

But before I left the house, Grandfather Kuzya beckoned me over, as he always did when he had something to tell me ‘eye in eye’, as we say in our language.

‘Hey, Kolima, come here a minute.’

I followed him up onto the roof, to the shed where he kept the pigeons. I entered after him. He turned round abruptly and eyed me, as if sizing me up:

‘Go into town and check that everything is all right. Let the others do the talking; you just listen. And watch out, especially with the Jews and the Ukrainians…’ He removed a layer of hay which covered the floor and pointed to a small gap between the wooden boards. ‘Lift up the loose plank and take what you find. Never part with it, and if someone gets among you, use it. I’ve loaded it.’ Then he went out, leaving me alone facing the little trap door. I lifted the plank and found a Nagant, the legendary revolver loved and used by our old criminals.

What Grandfather Kuzya had said to me had a precise meaning in the criminal language: receiving a loaded pistol from an Authority is like having permission to use it in any situation. You’re protected; you don’t need to worry about the consequences. In many cases, if the situation becomes critical, you only have to say ‘I have a pistol loaded by…’ and everything will be resolved in your favour, because at that point to act against you would be equivalent to acting against the person who loaded your gun.

Outside Grandfather Kuzya’s house two adult drivers were waiting for us – two young criminals from our area who had been given orders to take us wherever we wanted but not to intervene unless it was a matter of life or death.

Before getting into the cars we talked for a while, to make a rough strategic plan. We decided that Gagarin, the oldest of us, would look after the money, and that he would also have the responsibility of talking to people. The rest of us would split up into two groups: the first would cover Gagarin’s back, and the second, while he was talking, would go round sticking their noses into other people’s business, looking for clues.

‘This is the first time we’ve had to work as cops,’ said Gagarin.

We had a bit of a laugh about this, then set off for our tour of Bender. In reality there was nothing to laugh about: it was like descending into hell.

In the car Mel told me he was a bit worried and handed me a gun, saying:

‘Here – I know you’ll only have come with a knife, as usual. But this is a serious business; take it, even if you don’t like the idea. Do it for me.’

I told him I already had one, and he relaxed, giving me a wink:

‘Been round to your uncle’s, then, have you?’

I felt too important to give away the secret of the gun I was carrying, so I just smiled and sang softly:

‘Mother Siberia, save my life…’

We arrived in Centre, at a bar run by an old criminal, Pavel, the Guardian of the district. Pavel was not Siberian and didn’t live according to our rules, so with him we had to be diplomatic, though not excessively so: after all, we came from the oldest and most important district in the criminal world, Low River, and we deserved respect for the mere fact of being Siberian.

Pavel was in the bar with a group of friends, people from southern Russia who followed no precise rules except those of the god Money – people who flaunted their wealth, wore fashionable clothes and plenty of gold chains, bracelets and rings. We didn’t like this custom: according to the Siberian tradition a worthy criminal has nothing on him but his tattoos; the rest is humble, as the Lord teaches.

We greeted those present and entered. A man got up from the table where the owner was playing cards with his friends. He was a thin man of about thirty, adorned with gold and wearing a red jacket which was as sweetly scented as a rose in springtime or, as my Uncle Sergey would say, ‘as a whore between the legs’. He addressed us very aggressively: his opening remarks alone, according to our laws, would have been enough to earn him a knifing.

He was a troublemaker; men of his kind are like dogs that bark to frighten passers-by. That’s the only function they have. A well-bred, experienced criminal knows that and ignores them; he doesn’t even glance at them, so that it’s immediately clear he’s not a fraer, a clown.

We walked on and headed for the table, leaving the idiot shouting and cursing.

Old Pavel looked at us closely and asked us in a very coarse manner what we wanted.

Gagarin had done three spells in juvenile prison and a year earlier had killed two cops. In his seventeen years of life he had already garnered enough experience to know how to speak to people like that, so he gave him a brief outline of the situation.

He told him about the money, and about the need to find the culprits.

Instantly everything changed. Pavel got up and ripped open his shirt aggressively, displaying his chest, which was covered with tattoos and gold chains. At the same time he shouted:

‘There can be no forgiveness for someone who’s committed such a crime! I swear to God if I find him I’ll kill him with my own hands!’

Gagarin, as cool and calm as a dead man on the day of his funeral, said there was no need to kill him – we would do that; but if he could spread the word around and help us find him it would be very useful. Then he repeated that we would give a big reward to anyone who could help us.

Pavel assured us that he would do all he could to find out who the bastard was. Then he offered us a drink, but we asked permission to leave, since we still had a lot of calls to make.

As we left we noticed that cars and scooters were already beginning to arrive outside the bar: clearly old Pavel had called the people of his district together to explain the matter to them.

Our second port of call was the district of Railway. The criminals of Railway specialized mainly in burglaries from apartments. Theirs was a multiethnic community, with criminal rules which also applied in most of the prisons in the Soviet Union. It was all based on collectivism; the highest Authorities, the Thieves in Law, handled everyone’s money.

Railway, as I have already mentioned, was an area dominated by Black Seed, the caste that officially governed the Russian criminal world because of the large number of its members, and above all of its supporters.

Between Black Seed and us there had always been a kind of tension; they described themselves as the leaders of the criminal world, and their presence was very evident both inside prison and outside, but the foundations of their criminal tradition, most of their rules, and even their tattoos, were copied from us Urkas.

Their caste emerged at the beginning of the century, exploiting a moment of great social weakness in the country, which was full of desperate people – vagabonds and small-time criminals who were happy to go to prison for the sake of the free meals and the certainty of having a roof over their heads at night. Gradually they became a powerful community, but one with a lot of flaws, as many Authorities of Black Seed themselves acknowledged.

In Railway everything was organized more or less as it was among us. There was a Guardian responsible for what happened in his area, who was answerable to the Thieves in Law; and there were checks on those who entered and left the district.

And sure enough, at the border of Railway our car was stopped by a roadblock of young criminals.

To show that we were relaxed, we waited in the car until one of them came over and started talking to Gagarin. The others leaned against their cars, smoking, and now and then threw an abstracted glance at us, but casually, as if by chance.

I knew one of them; I had stabbed him in the fight in Centre. Afterwards, however, everything had been sorted out, and according to the rules, once settled, the matter must never be mentioned again. He looked at me; I waved to him from inside the car and he grimaced as if he were still in pain from where I had wounded him. Then he laughed and made a sign to me with his index finger which meant ‘watch out’ – a playful gesture, as if to say that he wasn’t angry with me.

I answered him with a grin, then I showed him my hands: I showed them empty, with the palms upwards, a positive gesture, which is made to emphasize your humility and straightforwardness and indifference to what is happening.

While I was exchanging gestures of goodwill with this guy, Gagarin was explaining to one of them the reason for our visit. They called someone on a mobile phone, and a few minutes later a boy arrived on a scooter. He was our guide; he had to take us to the Guardian of the area, ‘Barbos’, who was so nicknamed because he was a dwarf, and barbos is a joking name for small, weak dogs.

Barbos was a remarkable person – very well-educated, intelligent, shrewd, and with a rare sense of humour which enabled him to laugh about everything, even his stature. But there was also a less positive side to his character: he was very quick-tempered, and in forty-six years of life had accumulated no fewer than four convictions for murder.

A lot of crazy stories were told about him. For example, that his mother was a witch and had made him immortal by feeding him on the ashes of diamonds. Or that he had devoured his twin brother in his mother’s womb, and because of this she had cursed him, stunting his growth.

My uncle, who had known him all his life, said that when he was a boy Barbos used to go to the butcher’s to practise hitting people on the head with an iron bar: he used to bash the skinned beasts hanging on the hooks, and thus perfected his technique with the iron bar until he became a skilled assassin.

It was very strange that in the community of Black Seed, where murder was almost despised as a crime, at least by the highest Authorities, a man like him had succeeded in reaching such an important position in the hierarchy: I suspect he had been given the role of Guardian to keep everyone quiet during a delicate period for Black Seed, which in recent times had been getting a bit out of control and seemed to be in need of a firm hand.

Following the guy on his scooter we entered the side streets behind the railway tracks. Suddenly the boy stopped and pointed at an open door. We got out of the cars and at the same moment Barbos emerged, with three young criminals.

He came over to us and we exchanged greetings. Following the Siberian rules, as our host he first inquired after the health of some elders of Low River. Each time, after our replies, he crossed himself and thanked the Lord for showing His goodness to our elders. After the formalities he asked us the reason for our visit.

Gagarin briefly explained the whole story to him, and when he mentioned the money offered as a reward for accurate information about the rapist the dwarf’s face changed, becoming like a sharpened blade, taut with anger.

He called one of his assistants, whispered something in his ear, and then hurriedly apologized to us, assuring us that he would soon explain everything. After a few minutes his man returned with a small holdall, which he handed to Barbos. Barbos gave it to Gagarin, who opened it and showed it to all of us: it was packed with wads of dollar bills and two guns.

‘There are ten thousand here; I take the liberty of adding them to your reward for the head of that bastard… As for the guns,’ the dwarf gave an evil smile, ‘they’re for you too: when you find him, pump lead into him on behalf of all the honest thieves of our area, since we wouldn’t presume to do it ourselves. This justice is yours.’

We couldn’t refuse – it would have been rude – so we thanked him.

We left the district feeling pleased at the welcome Barbos had given us and at his generosity, but I was miserable. I felt even worse than before: the thought of Ksyusha continued to haunt me. Something told me the wound had been too deep; I realized I was thinking of her almost as if she were dead.

The next call we had to make was at a district called ‘Bam’, an acronym of Baykal-Amur Magistral, the railway line connecting the famous Lake Baikal with the great Siberian river.

A motorway had been built alongside the railway, and in the 1960s many new industrial towns had been erected where large numbers of people had come to live, their purpose being to work in order to guarantee the progress of the socialist country. All these towns were identical: they consisted of five or six areas known as ‘microdistricts’, and on the whole presented an awfully dreary landscape. The houses were all built to the same model: nine-storey apartment blocks in rows of three with small front gardens where the grass never grew and the trees never lasted more than one season for lack of sunlight. On those little plots of land there was also a playground for children, with monstrous toys made of remnants of iron and cement, full of sharp edges and painted in the communist style – in a single colour, regardless of what they were supposed to represent, just like the ideal of communist society, where everyone is obliged to be the same as everyone else. Although Mother Nature had made the crocodile green and the lion tawny, both animals were painted red, so that they seemed like the creations of some maniac painter. All these toy animals, which were supposed to be for the children’s entertainment, were cemented into the asphalt, and after the first few showers of rain became covered with rust. The risk of getting tetanus by cutting yourself was extremely high.

This brilliant playground initiative in the new towns was immediately dubbed ‘goodbye kids’, because of the many injuries to children that occurred every day. So after a few years, the first thing anyone who came to live there did was to dismantle those playgrounds, to guarantee their offspring a healthy and happy childhood.

In our town, Bam was the area of nine-storey houses inhabited by poor people, down-and-outs: most of them were hooligans, or the kind of people who in Siberia are described as ‘off limits’ – delinquents who because of their ignorance are not able to follow the laws of an honest, worthy criminal life.

Addiction had almost become a social convention in Bam. Drugs were always circulating, day and night. Kids started using them at twelve years old and were lucky if they reached adulthood; the few who did already seemed old by the age of eighteen – they were toothless and had skin that looked like marble. They committed minor crimes such as burglary and pickpocketing, but also a lot of murders.

Some of the stories that were told about Bam were chilling – terrible illustrations of the depths of ignorance and despair to which man can be driven: newborn babies thrown out of windows by their mothers, sons who brutally murdered their parents, brothers who killed their brothers, teenage girls forced into prostitution by their brothers or fathers or uncles.

It was a fairly multiethnic area – there were a lot of Moldovans, gipsies, Ukrainians, people from southern Russia, and a few families from the Caucasus. They had only one thing in common: their total inability to live in a civilized manner.

There was no law in Bam, and no person who could take responsibility before honest criminals for all the terrible things that went on there.

Consequently, the people who lived there were described as zakontachenye, ‘contaminated’. According to the criminal laws you cannot associate with them as with normal people. It is forbidden to have any physical contact with them; you are not allowed to greet them, either vocally or with a handshake. You cannot use any object that has previously been used by them. You cannot eat with them, drink with them or share their table or their house. In jail – as I’ve already mentioned – tainted prisoners live in a corner of their own; often they are made to sleep under the bunks and to eat with plates and spoons that have been marked with a hole in the middle. They are forced to wear dirty, torn clothes, and are not allowed to have pockets, which are removed or unstitched. Every time they use the latrine they have to burn some paper inside it, because according to the criminal beliefs only fire can cleanse a thing that has come into contact with a tainted person.

People who have once been classified as tainted can never rid themselves of that stigma; they carry it with them for the rest of their lives; so outside prison they are forced to live with others like them, because nobody else wants them anywhere near them.

Homosexual relations are common among them, especially among the young drug addicts, who often prostitute themselves in the big cities of Russia and are much appreciated in homosexual circles for their youth and their modest demands. In St Petersburg many respectable citizens abuse them, then pay them with dinner in a beer hall or by letting them spend the night in a hotel room, where they can sleep in a warm bed and wash under the shower. The age of these boys ranges from twelve to sixteen: by seventeen, after four years spent in the ‘system’ – as drug addiction is called in criminal slang – they’re completely burnt out.

According to the criminal rules, a tainted person can never be struck with the hands: if it is necessary to strike him it must be done with the feet, or better still with a stick or an iron bar. But he mustn’t be stabbed, because death by knife is considered to be almost a sign of respect for your enemy, something the victim has to deserve. If an honest criminal stabs a tainted person, he too is permanently tainted and his life is ruined.

So when dealing with the people of Bam you had to be careful and know how to behave, otherwise you risked losing your position in the community.

There was a place in Bam called ‘the Pole’. On this site there stood a real pole, made of concrete, which had been put there at some time in the past for an electric cable which had never in fact been completed. The criminals who represented power in the area at the time used to assemble around this pole; it was like a king’s throne, you might say. Power changed hands so often that the honest criminals of Low River jokingly called the continual internal wars in Bam ‘the dance around the pole’.

In Bam, since there was no criminal code or morality, the wars between criminals were very violent; they seemed like the chaotic scenes of a horror film. The clans gathered around an old criminal, who with the help of his warriors, all junkies and juveniles, tried to take control of the drugs trade in the area by physically eliminating their adversaries – the members of the clan which was handling the drugs at the time and was therefore the most powerful. They used knives, because they didn’t have many firearms, and in any case they weren’t very expert at using them, not having been brought up to have a familiarity with pistols and rifles. During their wars they even killed the women and children of the clans they were fighting against – their ferocity knew no bounds.

Entering the district, we headed straight for the Pole. We drove along a series of streets the mere sight of which induced sadness and anguish, but also a certain relief, if you thought how lucky you were not to have been born in this place.

The Pole was in the middle of a small square, round the sides of which there were benches, as well as a school desk with a plastic chair. Sitting round the desk were some kids, about fifteen in all, and on the chair sat an old man whose age was impossible to tell, he was so decrepit.

We got out of the cars. According to the rules we had to act tough, so we took out the sticks we’d brought in the boots of the cars and advanced towards them. The air was filled with a tension which, when we stopped a few metres away from them, became pure terror. It was important not to go too close, to keep our distance, so as to emphasize our position in the criminal community. They said nothing and kept their eyes down; they knew how to behave towards honest people. According to the rules, they could not initiate the conversation; they were only allowed to answer questions. Without giving any greeting, Gagarin addressed the old man, telling him we were looking for the guy who had raped a girl near the market, and that we would give twenty thousand dollars to anyone who helped us find him.

The old man immediately jumped down from his chair, went over to a bench and grabbed by the lapel a little boy whose face was disfigured by a large burn. The boy started screaming desperately, saying it was nothing to do with him, but the old man hit him repeatedly on the head till he drew blood, shouting:

‘You son of a bitch, you bastard! I knew you’d rape her in the end, you scum!’

The other boys, too, jumped down from their benches and all started hitting their classmate.

Leaving him in their hands, the old man turned towards us, as if he wanted to say something. Gagarin ordered him to speak, and he immediately started pouring out a flood of words (mingled with various curses and insults which in our district would have got him killed), the gist of which was what we had already gathered: the person who had raped the girl was the little boy with the disfigured face.

‘We were together at the market,’ said the old man. ‘I saw him follow the girl; I shouted to him not to, but he disappeared. I didn’t see him again; I don’t know what happened afterwards.’

His story was so stupid and naive that none of us believed it for a second.

Gagarin asked him to describe the girl, and the old man became flustered; he started whispering something incomprehensible, gesticulating with his hands, as if to sketch a female figure in the air.

A moment later I saw the stick that Gagarin was holding come down with tremendous force and speed on the head of the old man, who fell down unconscious, bleeding from the nose.

The others immediately stopped hitting the accused rapist – who looked so weak and demoralized he wouldn’t even have been able to wank himself off, let alone rape a girl – and fled in all directions.

The only people left under the Pole were the old man with the broken head, sprawling in his own blood, and the boy they had intended to use as a scapegoat in exchange for the money. That scene, and the thought of that treachery, made my already sad and despairing heart sink even further.

So without having achieved anything we left the area, hoping the boys who had fled would start searching for the real rapist in order to sell him to us.

We decided to go to a place called ‘Grandmother Masha’s Whistle’. This was a private house where an old woman cooked and ran a kind of restaurant for criminals. The food was excellent, and the atmosphere friendly and welcoming.

In her youth Grandmother Masha had worked on the railways, and she still wore round her neck the whistle she had used to announce the departure of the trains: hence the name of the joint.

She had three sons, who were serving long sentences in three different prisons in Russia.

People went to the Whistle to eat or spend a quiet evening discussing business and playing cards, but also to hide things in the cellar, which was like a kind of bank vault, full of stuff deposited by the criminals: sometimes grandmother gave them a receipt, a piece of paper carefully torn out of her notebook on which she wrote in her almost perfect handwriting something like:

Grandmother Masha made excellent pelmeni, which are large ravioli filled with plenty of meat, a Siberian dish that was common all over Soviet territory. When she decided to cook them she spread the word a couple of days beforehand: she would send out the homeless boys whom she took into her house in exchange for help in the kitchen and the occasional errand. The boys would get on their bikes and ride round all the places where the right people gathered, to tell them what Grandmother Masha was cooking.

Besides doing this, the boys also passed round the latest news: if you wanted to spread some information around, you only had to offer the boys a little money or a couple of packets of cigarettes and within two or three hours the whole town would know about it. They were also very useful in the struggle against the police: if there were trouble in any district of Bender and the police came to arrest someone, the boys would spread the word and the people concerned would turn out to set the arrested man free or to have a little gunfight with the police, just for the hell of it.

We needed the help of Grandmother Masha’s boys now, to spread the news around town about our inquiries and our honest offer, but we were a little tired, and we were hungry.

When we reached the Whistle, darkness was falling. She welcomed us as she always did, with a smile and kind words, calling us ‘little ones’ and kissing us on both cheeks. To her we were all children, even the older ones. We sat down at a table and she joined us; she always did this with everyone: she would chat a bit before bringing you something to eat. We told her about our disaster; she heard us out, then said she’d already heard the story from her boys. We sat for a while in silence while she, with the cloth she always had in her hands, dried the tears from her wrinkled face. To look at that face you felt as if you were in the presence of the incarnation of Mother Earth.

Grandmother Masha started bringing us cutlery and something to drink. In the meantime we called over one of her boys, a thin little lad with one eye missing and snow-white hair, who was the brightest of them all; his name was ‘Begunok’, which means ‘the one who runs fast’. He was a very serious boy; if he said he would do something you could be sure he would do it. We asked him to spread the word among the people he knew in town, and in particular to go round all the bars where people gathered to drink and hang out together. Mel slipped a packet of cigarettes and a five-dollar bill into his hand, and a second later we heard his bike setting off at top speed.

We ate our supper in silence, with none of our usual lively chatter. I was ravenous but found it very hard to eat. As I chewed the food I felt a pain in my chest. I couldn’t swallow anything without washing it down with alcohol, so before long I was drunk and beginning to get maudlin. The others were in a similar state. Supper went slowly, without enthusiasm. Everyone’s eyes became increasingly glazed, and the atmosphere was really gloomy.

Suddenly, amidst the heavy sighs and whispered moans, one of us started crying, but very softly, ashamed at this manifestation of weakness. It was the youngest of the gang. He was thirteen and his name was Lyocha, nicknamed ‘Grave’ because of his cadaverous appearance: he was thin and always ill, as well as being constantly in a bad mood. He had already tried to hang himself ten times, but had always been saved by one of us. Once he had even tried to shoot himself in the heart with his uncle’s gun, but the bullet had only punctured his lung, further seriously impairing his already poor health. Another time, when blind drunk, he had jumped in the river, trying to drown himself, but hadn’t succeeded because he was a very good swimmer, and the survival instinct had prevailed. The only reason he had never tried to slit his veins was that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood: even in fights he never used a knife, but only hit people with a knuckleduster or an iron bar.

Grave was a boy with a lot of problems, but in spite of everything he fitted in well with our group, and he was like a brother to all of us. His suicidal tendency was like a ghost that lay hidden inside him; none of us could be sure when it would pop out, so he was constantly watched over by an older boy, Vitya, who was nicknamed ‘Cat’, because his mother said that just after he was born their cat Lisa had given birth to four kittens and at night she used to go into his cradle and suckle him, so that, according to his mother, he had become half cat. The two of them, Grave and Cat, always went around together, and their main occupation was fishing and stealing motorboats; they were the experts on the river, they knew all the particular points – where the water was still or swift, where the current swirled back, where the bed was deepest – and always knew with absolute precision where to find the fish, all year round. They never returned from a fishing expedition with empty boats, never.

At parties, and whenever we drank together, a sudden flood of tears from Grave was a sure sign that he would soon try to kill himself: so, in accordance with a rule laid down by us and approved by Grave himself (who when sober, despite all his psychological problems, had a great zest for life), we would take away his drink, and in extreme cases even tie him to his chair with a rope.

So on this occasion too, at the Whistle, while Grave was trying to stop crying, wiping his face with a handkerchief, Gagarin made a sign to Cat, who instantly replaced the bottle of vodka in front of Grave with a fizzy drink called Puppet, a kind of Soviet Coca-Cola. Grave stopped crying and drained the bottle of Puppet, ending with a long, sad burp.

Gagarin was talking to our drivers, Makar, known as ‘Lynx’, and Ivan, known as ‘the Wheel’. They were in their early twenties, and both had just finished a five-year prison sentence. They were bosom pals. Together they had carried out a lot of robberies, and in the last one, after a gunfight with the police, the Wheel had been wounded and Lynx had refused to desert him and so he had been arrested too, because of his loyalty.

During our mission, according to the rules, they couldn’t help us to communicate with the criminals of the various areas of the town, which was a pity: it would have been very useful, since we were all under age, and the criminals who didn’t embrace our Siberian faith took the idea of dealing with juveniles as a personal insult. What Lynx and the Wheel could do was advise us how to behave, how to negotiate with people who obeyed rules different from our own, and how to exploit the peculiarities of each person and each community. It was important, part of our upbringing, this continual relationship between youngsters and adults who explained each individual situation according to the law observed by our elders.

While Gagarin listened to what Lynx and the Wheel had to say to him, the others started talking amongst themselves; perhaps Grave’s crying had woken us all up and somehow helped to make us united and focused again.

Suddenly Mel started telling me a story he always repeated whenever he got drunk, and had done since the age of ten – a childhood fantasy of his. He had met a girl, he claimed, on the river bank, and had promised to take her to the cinema. Then they had made love; and when he reached this point in the story he always commented:

‘It was like screwing a princess.’ Then he would launch into a detailed description of the sex they’d had, Mel depicting himself as a vigorous and expert lover. The story ended with her weeping on his shoulder and asking him to stay a little longer, and him reluctantly having to leave her because he was late for fishing.

It was the most incredible, ridiculous nonsense, but since Mel was a friend I listened to him with feigned interest and genuine patience.

He would talk to me with such rapture that his only eye became as thin as a scar. He would accompany the story with ample gestures of his gigantic hands, and whenever one of his hands passed over the bottle of vodka I would have to grab it, to stop it falling over.

The supper, as always, turned into a drunken binge. We went on and on drinking, and to stop us getting too drunk, Grandmother Masha kept bringing us plates of the food we ate as an accompaniment to vodka.

Shortly before midnight Begunok returned, with some news: a group of boys from the district of Caucasus, during the very hours when Ksyusha had been raped, had seen some strangers wandering about in Centre.

‘They were hanging around near the phone boxes,’ said Begunok, with a serious expression on his face, ‘pestering a girl.’

Without waiting to hear more, we dashed out to the cars.

Caucasus was a district almost as old as our own. It was so called because many of its inhabitants came from the Caucasus, but also because of its position: it stood on a cluster of hills. The criminals of Caucasus belonged to various communities, but the leading one was the so-called ‘Georgian Family’. Then came the Armenians, who formed the Kamashchatoy – Armenian organized crime – and lastly people from many other regions: Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

The Georgians and Armenians got on well together, being united by the fact that they were both Caucasian peoples of Orthodox Christian religion, whereas the other inhabitants of the area were either Muslims or atheists of Islamic tradition. The criminal communities of the Georgians and Armenians had a family structure: in order to become an Authority you didn’t need to earn the respect of others, as among us Siberians; you merely had to be in the right family. The clans were made up of the members of the families, and they dealt in various kinds of criminal business, black marketeering, protection rackets, minor thefts and murder.

Because of their way of operating the Georgians were viewed with distaste by our community: often our criminals refused to communicate with them simply because they introduced themselves as the sons or relatives of some Authority. Among the Siberians such behaviour is unacceptable, because in our culture everyone is judged for what he represents as a person, and his roots come second; in Siberia you appeal to the protection of the family when you really can’t avoid it, solely in matters of life or death.

For these and other reasons there was a lot of friction between us and the people of Caucasus: if we met up somewhere in town, it always ended in a fight, and occasionally someone got killed.

Two years earlier a friend of ours, Mitya, known as ‘Julich’, which in slang means ‘little criminal’, had stabbed a Georgian because he had insulted him by speaking the Georgian language in his presence. Julich had warned him, saying he was behaving in an offensive manner, but the other had made it clear that he intended to go on speaking Georgian because he despised the Russians, whom he called ‘occupiers’. That was a political provocation: Julich reacted by stabbing him, and he later died in hospital. After his death the Georgians appealed to the old criminals of Black Seed for justice, but the verdict went against them, because according to the criminal law the Georgian had committed two serious errors: first, he had been discourteous to another criminal for no reason; secondly, he had dared to make a political allusion, which is condemned by the criminal regulations as a grave form of insult to the entire criminal community, because politics is cops’ stuff, and criminals must have nothing to do with it.

After the verdict, however, the Georgians didn’t calm down at all. They tried to get revenge a couple of times: first they shot a friend of ours called Vasya, who fortunately survived, then they tried to kill Julich in one of the discotheques in the town. They started a fight to tempt him outside the disco, where a number of them then attacked him. Luckily we were with him on that occasion, and we plunged into the fray to cover his back.

While we were fighting we noticed that they kept launching ‘torpedoes’ at Julich: that’s what we call a method of killing a particular person during a fight, while pretending that it’s an accident. Some guys, two or three of them, bump into the person – the victim, or ‘client’ – as if by mistake, and in the confusion they give another guy – the torpedo – the chance to make a precision strike to kill him, after which they merge back into the crowd; and in the end, if the torpedo has been skilful, nobody will have noticed anything and the whole action will have been carried out in a swift, professional manner. The client’s death is treated as a normal consequence of the fight, and therefore forgotten immediately afterwards, because a fight is considered to be an extreme method of obtaining satisfaction, and every participant knows from the outset the risks he is running. But if during the brawl someone is caught launching a torpedo, he must be killed for violating the rules of the fight: his action is interpreted as outright murder. The premeditated murder of a colleague, a criminal, is considered an act of cowardice. The murderer’s criminal dignity dies at that moment, and as the criminal law says, ‘when his criminal dignity dies, the criminal himself dies too’.

On this occasion there were far fewer of us than there were of them. They intended to beat us up and launch the torpedo at Julich, but unfortunately for them, after a couple of minutes we were interrupted by the boys of Centre, the district where we were at the time. Exercising their right as the ‘owners’ of the area, they ordered us to stop fighting.

Just at that moment the Georgians’ torpedo charged at Julich in full view of everyone, trying to stab him, but Julich managed to ward off the blow. The torpedo fell on the ground and started screaming something in his own language, ignoring the requests of the owners of the area that he calm down and put away the knife. In the end he actually cut the hand of one of the Centre boys, who had only asked him to give him his knife.

About three seconds later the Georgians were attacked en masse by the Centre guys, about thirty of them, and savagely beaten.

We apologized and explained the situation. Then we made an orderly retreat, taking a lot of bruises and plenty of cuts home with us.

When we got back to Low River we told the Guardian what had happened. To obtain justice against the Georgians we needed an external witness, someone who was not part of our group. Luckily three people of Centre testified to the old Authorities that they had seen the torpedo with their own eyes.

So a week later the Siberians made a punitive raid into the Caucasus district, which ended with the death of eight Georgians who had participated in the plot against Julich.

Naturally this unpleasant episode considerably worsened our already difficult relations with the Georgians. The Georgians started going around saying we Siberians were murderers and unjust people. We knew we were in the right and that the situation had been resolved in our favour; the rest didn’t bother us very much.

We drove to a joint in the Caucasus district called ‘The Maze’. It was a kind of bar-cum-restaurant, with a room where you could play billiards and cards.

Begunok had been very specific: he had said the people who had told him the story about the phone boxes were the sons of the owner of that restaurant. And they were Georgians.

We arrived at the Maze at about two in the morning; there were lots of cars outside and the shouts of the gamblers could be heard outside. They were shouts in Georgian, interspersed with a lot of Russian swear-words with Georgian endings.

We got out of the cars – our drivers said they would keep the engines running just in case – and entered all together.

When I think about it now it makes my hair stand on end: a bunch of juveniles – snotty-nosed kids – not just boldly walking around in a district full of people who want them dead, but actually entering a bar packed with real criminals who were far more dangerous than them. And yet at the time we weren’t in the least afraid because we had a job to do.

As soon as we entered the Maze the owner’s eldest son, a boy named Mino, came over to us. I knew him by sight; I had heard he was a quiet guy who minded his own business. He greeted us, shaking us by the hand, then invited us to sit down at a table. We did so and he asked a girl to bring wine and Georgian bread – it was on the house. Without our even asking him, he started telling us what he had seen in Centre.

He had been with some friends, including three Armenian boys, one of whom ran a flower stall in the market, not far from there. They had been standing near the phone boxes – where people often arrange to meet – when they had seen about ten youngsters, drunk or high on drugs, pestering a girl, trying to pick a quarrel in a rough and threatening way. One of the Armenians had asked them to stop it and leave her alone, but they had insulted him, and one had even shown him his gun, telling him to get lost.

‘At that point,’ said Mino, ‘we decided to back off. It’s true, we left the girl in the hands of those thugs, but only because we weren’t sure who they were. We were worried they might turn out to have links with the people of Centre, and you never know, they might have closed down my friend’s flower stall…’

Judging from Mino’s description, though, the girl didn’t sound like our Ksyusha.

Meanwhile the waitress had brought to our table some Georgian wine with some of their traditional bread, which is baked in a special way, spread on the walls of the oven. It was delicious, and we drank and ate with relish, together with Mino, talking about all sorts of things. Including our relationship with the Georgians.

He said we were right, and that his fellow-countrymen had behaved shamefully, like traitors.

‘Besides, we’re all Christians, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘We all believe in Jesus Christ. We’re all criminals, too, and the criminal law applies to everyone – Georgians, Siberians and Armenians…’

He told us the Georgian community had recently split in two. One part supported a rich young Georgian of noble blood who liked to be called ‘the Count’. This Count spread a hatred of the Russians and forbade Georgians to marry Russians and Armenians, to preserve the purity of the race. Mino called him ‘Hitler’, and was very angry with him; he said he had weakened the whole community. The rest of the Georgians supported an old criminal whom we also knew, because he often came to Low River: Grandfather Vanò. He was a wise man; he had spent a long time in prison in Siberia and was highly respected by the criminal community. It was mainly the old folk who liked him. He wasn’t so popular among the young because he stopped them living a life of pleasure and opposed nationalism, which the boys didn’t like at all.

From Mino’s account we understood that the situation was more difficult than it might seem at first sight, because the division cut across families, and many sons, brothers and fathers had lined up on opposite sides of the barricade. A war in those conditions was impossible, so everything was in a state of suspense, which according to Mino was even more dangerous than open warfare.

At a certain point five people came into the restaurant. They were young – no more than twenty-five years old – and they spoke to Mino in Georgian. He got up at once and went over to them.

They seemed pretty angry, and a couple of times I saw them point at us. At first they all talked at once, then their leader started speaking, a thin boy with eyes that popped out of their orbits whenever he raised his voice.

Mino, however, was calm; he leaned against the counter with a glass of wine in his hand and listened to them, looking at the floor with an indifferent expression.

The leader suddenly stopped talking, and all five of them left. Then Mino hurried over to our table and explained to us in an agitated voice that they were young members of the Count’s gang:

‘They said if you don’t leave the district at once they’ll come back in numbers and kill you.’

After Mino’s warm welcome this threat seemed unreal.

Before getting up from the table, Speechless, one of our group, said:

‘I’d be prepared to bet my right hand they’ve set an ambush for us outside.’

Speechless was so nicknamed because he hardly ever spoke, but when he did speak he always said true things. Once I spent three days fishing with him, and in three days he didn’t utter a sound, I swear it, not one.

Gagarin gave the signal to get ready to leave the bar. Everyone put their hands under the table and there was a sound of pistols being cocked one after the other.

We took our leave of Mino. He begged us to use the security exit, but we went through the front door, the way we’d come in.

In the square outside the bar there were about fifteen people waiting for us, gathered under the street light.

Mel and Gagarin stepped forward; I walked behind them with Speechless, then came the others. I saw Mel pull out his Tokarev and at the same time Gagarin hide the hand holding his Makarov behind his back. I was clutching Grandfather Kuzya’s Nagant in my jacket pocket.

They were blocking our way towards the cars. Our drivers had got out and were smoking casually, sitting on the bonnets.

We stopped a few metres short of the Georgians.

The thin boy, their leader, came forward to challenge us:

‘You’re finished. There’s no escape for you.’

He spoke with great confidence. In his hands I saw a pistol, and behind him there was another guy with a double-barrelled shotgun.

‘If you don’t want any trouble, you only have one chance: lay down your arms and surrender.’

Then he started joking:

‘Aren’t you a bit young to be playing with guns?’

Quite unperturbed, Gagarin explained to him the reason for our visit, and stressed that it had nothing to do with relations between the Georgians and the Siberians.

‘And anyway,’ Gagarin reminded him, ‘according to the criminal law, in cases like this even wars are suspended.’

He recalled a case in St Petersburg, where because of a hunt for a paedophile who was raping and killing young children a bloody war between two gangs – from the district of Ligovka and the island of Vasilev – had stopped, and the two sides had joined forces to search for the maniac.

The Georgians were rather confused now.

I noticed that while Gagarin was talking to their leader many of them had lowered their weapons, and their expressions had become rather pensive.

The Georgian, however, didn’t give up.

‘Well, in that case,’ he asked suddenly, ‘why didn’t you speak to our Guardian? Why did you come here in secret, like snakes?’

On the one hand he was right: we should have gone to see their Guardian, because making inquiries behind his back was against the criminal regulations. But he was overlooking two things.

First, we were juveniles, and according to the law nothing could be ‘asked’ of us: only other juveniles could ‘ask’ us, adults had no power over us. Out of respect and for our personal pleasure we could choose to obey the rules and the criminal law of the adults, but until we came of age we would not be part of the criminal community. If a Guardian had reported our case to an old Authority, the latter would have laughed in his face: in cases like this the Siberians usually say:

‘Boys are like cats – they go wherever they want.’

The second mistake the Georgian had made was much more serious, and showed that he was inexperienced in negotiations and quite incapable of using criminal diplomacy. He had insulted us.

An insult is regarded by all communities as an error typical of people who are weak and unintelligent, lacking in criminal dignity. To us Siberians, any kind of insult is a crime; in other communities some distinctions can be made, but in general an insult is the quickest route to the blade of a knife.

An insult to an individual may be ‘approved’: that is to say, if I have insulted someone and they take me before an old Authority, I will have to explain to him the reason why I did it, and he will decide how I will be punished. Punishment is inflicted in any case, but if the insult is approved, they don’t kill me or ‘lower’ me; I remain myself and get off with a warning. An insult is approved if you utter it for personal reasons and in a non-serious form: for example, if you call someone who has damaged your property an ‘arsehole’. If, however, you offended the name of his mother, they are quite likely to kill you.

Insults are forgiven if they are uttered in a state of rage or desperation, when a person is blinded by deep grief – for example, if his mother or father or a close friend dies. In such cases the question of justice is not even mentioned; he is judged to have been ‘beside himself’, and there the matter ends.

Insults are not approved, however, in a quarrel that arises from gambling or criminal activities, or in matters of the heart, or in relations between friends: in all these cases the use of swear-words and offensive phrases usually means certain death.

But the most serious insult of all is that known as baklanka, when a group or a whole community is insulted. No explanations are accepted: you deserve either death or ‘lowering’ – a permanent transfer to the community of the lowered, the tainted, like the people who lived in the district of Bam.

So from childhood onwards we learned to ‘filter words’, and always to keep a check on what came out of our mouths, so as not to make a mistake, even unwittingly. For according to the Siberian rule, a word that has flown can never return.

The insult the Georgian had thrown at us was quite a serious one: he had said ‘you have come like snakes’, so he had offended us all.

So we performed the typical scene known in slang as ‘purchase’. This is one of the many tricks that are used among criminals to conclude a negotiation favourably; we Siberians are adept at these tricks. The principle of the ‘purchase’ is that of convincing your adversary that he is in the wrong and making him yield little by little, until you utterly terrorize him and take complete control of the situation, which in slang is termed ‘purchasing’.

Our whole gang, following Gagarin’s example, turned their backs on the Georgians. This gesture rendered them powerless, because it meant we had deprived them of all rights of criminal communication, even that of starting a fight.

It is normal to turn your back on people who are described as ‘garbage’, policemen or informers – those you despise so much you think they don’t even deserve a bullet. But if you turn your back on another criminal, it’s a different matter. You’re sending a definite signal. You’re telling him his behaviour has cost him his criminal dignity.

On the other hand, turning your back is always a risk. A true criminal will never attack someone who has his back to him, but if the person is not familiar with criminal relations, or if he’s treacherous, you might get a bullet in the back.

As we stood there with our backs turned, Gagarin explained to the Georgians that they had committed a serious error of conduct: they had insulted the juveniles of another district while they were carrying out a task that their community regarded as sacred, a task that must be respected by every criminal community.

‘I renounce the responsibility of holding negotiations with you,’ he added. ‘If you want to shoot us in the back, go ahead. Otherwise, withdraw. In the next few days we’ll present the question to the Authorities of Low River and ask for justice.’

Gagarin concluded with a master-stroke: he asked what their names were. In so doing he underlined another error committed by the Georgians, which was less serious but quite significant. Dignified criminals introduce themselves, exchange greetings and wish each other every blessing even before they start killing each other.

The Georgian spokesman didn’t reply at once: it was clear that the purchase was working. Then he introduced himself as the brother of another man, a young criminal very close to the Count, and said:

‘I’ll let you go this time, but only because I don’t want to complicate relations between our communities, which are already difficult enough.’

‘Well,’ Gagarin rebuked him sardonically, ‘I think you’ve already done enough to worsen the situation – for yourself and for your superiors.’

Without saying goodbye to them we walked towards our cars.

When we left they were still there under the street lamp, talking among themselves. Evidently they still couldn’t understand what had happened.

But it would all become clear very soon.

Three days later, to be precise, when Gagarin, Mel, Speechless and I made a formal ‘request’ to Grandfather Kuzya for the insult to the group and threats.

After diplomatic negotiations with the criminals of various areas of the town, those louts were punished by the Georgians themselves, who were tired of the burden of being boycotted by the communities of other districts. I know for a fact that some people of Centre threatened to close all the shops the Georgians owned in their area.

The thin boy who had spoken to us vanished into thin air. Some said he had been buried in a double grave: that was how troublesome corpses were hidden, by putting them in the same grave with another person. It was a certain way of making people disappear. The grave of one ordinary old man might contain several people who had been given up for lost by their community.

Leaving Caucasus, we headed for Centre, where we wanted to get some more information about the strangers who had been seen by Mino and his friends. We needed to find out if they had anything to do with our own sad case.

The road from Caucasus to the heart of Bender passed through a district called Balka, which in Russian simply means ‘wooden beam’, but in criminal slang means ‘graveyard’. It had earned that name because it was the former site of the old cemetery of the Polish Jews. The Jewish quarter, my grandfather told me, had grown up around the cemetery and then expanded, from the 1930s onwards.

I could never go through Balka without remembering a beautiful and terrible story which my grandfather used to tell me. And which I will now tell you.

The spiritual leader of the Jewish community of Balka was an old man called Moisha. According to the legend he was the first Jew to arrive in Transnistria, and through his character and his strong personality he had earned everyone’s respect. He had three sons and one daughter, who was, as we say, ‘preparing for marriage’ – that is, she was a young woman who had no other social task than that of looking after the house and learning how to obey her future husband, bring up his children and, as we say, ‘cough into her fist’ – that is, show total submission.

The rabbi’s daughter was called Zilya, and she was a really beautiful girl, with big blue eyes. She helped her mother run a draper’s shop in Centre, and many a customer would enter simply for the joy of spending a few moments in her company. Numerous Jewish families had asked the rabbi to give her in marriage to their sons, but he wouldn’t accept any of them, because many years earlier, when Zilya was only a baby, he had promised her hand to a young man of Odessa, the son of a friend of his.

It was customary among Jews to make arranged marriages, on the initiative of the fathers of families that were interested in uniting their stock; on these sad occasions the bride and bridegroom knew nothing of each other, and they rarely agreed with their parents’ choice, but they didn’t dare to contradict them, and above all they didn’t dare to break the traditions: for anyone who did so would be permanently expelled from the community. So they accepted their destiny with heavy hearts, and their whole life would become an eternal tragedy. It was such a well-known custom that even we Siberians used to joke among ourselves about the unhappiness of Jewish women, calling any hopeless and sad situation a ‘Jewish wife’.

Zilya already seemed completely convinced. Like a good Jewish girl she accepted, without rebelling against her father, the idea of marriage to a man twenty years older than her and – to judge from what people said – one with many faults.

Then one day into the shop came Svyatoslav, a young Siberian criminal who had just arrived in Transnistria. He belonged to the gang of a famous criminal called ‘Angel’, who had terrorized the communists for more than ten years, robbing trains in Siberia. Svyatoslav had been wounded in a gun battle, and his friends had sent him to Transnistria to convalesce. They had given him some money to give to the community of the Siberians, who had welcomed him without any problems. Svyatoslav had no family; his parents were dead. To cut a long story short, Svyatoslav fell in love with Zilya, and she fell in love with him.

As etiquette required, he went to Rabbi Moisha’s house and asked him for his daughter’s hand, but the rabbi dismissed him scornfully, thinking he was a pauper because his appearance was modest and, in accordance with Siberian law, he didn’t flaunt his wealth.

After suffering this humiliation, Svyatoslav appealed to the Guardian of Low River, who at that time was a criminal by the name of Sidor, nicknamed ‘Lynx’s Paw’, an old Siberian Urka. After listening to his account of the matter, Lynx’s Paw thought the Jew might have reacted like that because he had doubts about Svyatoslav’s financial position, so he advised him not to despair, but to go back to the rabbi with some jewels to offer as a gift to his daughter.

Siberian custom requires that the bridegroom himself make a proposal of marriage, but that he be accompanied by a member of his family, or in extreme cases by an old friend. So, in order to respect the law, Lynx’s Paw suggested that he himself should accompany Svyatoslav on his second attempt. They arrived at the rabbi’s house with many precious jewels, and again presented his suit, but again the rabbi dismissed them scornfully, even daring to insult them. Putting the jewels in his hand, he pretended that his palm had been burnt and dropped them on the floor, and when his guests asked him what had burnt him, he replied:

‘The human blood they are covered with.’

The two Siberians went away, already knowing what they had to do. Lynx’s Paw gave Svyatoslav permission to take the rabbi’s daughter to live in the Siberian quarter, if she agreed.

The beautiful Zilya ran away from home that very same night. Under Siberian law she could not take any possession from her father’s house except herself, so Svyatoslav had even brought her clothes for her elopement.

Next day the rabbi sent some Jewish criminals to negotiate with the Siberians. Lynx’s Paw explained to these men that according to our law any person who reaches the age of eighteen is free to do what they want, and it is a great sin to oppose this, especially when it is a question of forming a new family and of love, which are two God-willed things. The Jews showed their arrogance and threatened Lynx’s Paw with death. At that point he lost his temper and killed three of them instantly with a wooden chair; the fourth one he struck on the arm, breaking it, and sent him to Rabbi Moisha with these words:

‘He who names death doesn’t know that it is closest to him.’

At this all hell was let loose. Moisha, finding himself up against Siberians, about whom he knew nothing except that they were murderers and robbers who always stuck together, couldn’t challenge them on their own territory, so he asked the Jews of Odessa to help him.

The leaders of the Jewish community of Odessa, who were very rich and powerful, organized a meeting to discover where the truth lay, and how justice could be done. Everyone attended, including Svyatoslav, Zilya and Moisha.

After listening to both sides, the Jews tried to blame Svyatoslav, accusing him of kidnapping Moisha’s daughter, but the Siberians replied that according to Siberian law she had not been kidnapped, because she had left of her own free will, and this was proved by the fact that she had left in her father’s house everything that linked her with that place.

Moisha retorted that there was one thing she had taken away: a coloured ribbon with which she bound up her hair. It was true – Zilya had forgotten to take it off, and Moisha’s wife had noticed it.

Such a tiny detail was enough to turn the situation against the Siberians. According to our rules, now the girl would have to be returned to her father. But there was one objection.

Zilya, the Siberians said, had already married Svyatoslav, and in order to do so she had converted to the Orthodox faith and had been baptized with the Siberian Cross: therefore, according to our laws, the powers of the parents could no longer extend over her, since they were of a faith different from hers. However, if Moisha, too, converted to the Orthodox faith, his word would carry a different weight…

In a fury, Moisha tried to stab Svyatoslav with a knife, and wounded him.

And thereby he made a serious mistake: he violated the peace in a criminal meeting, a crime that must be punished by immediate hanging.

To take his own life, Moisha decided to use that ribbon of cloth that his daughter wore in her hair. He died cursing Zilya and her husband, wishing every evil on their children, on their children’s children and on all those who loved them.

Soon afterwards Zilya fell ill. Her condition deteriorated, and no medicine could cure her. So Svyatoslav took her to Siberia, to see an old shaman of the tribe of the Nency, a people of Siberian aborigines who had always had very close ties with the Siberian criminals, the Urkas.

The shaman said the girl was suffering because an evil spirit always kept her in the chill of death, removing the warmth of life from her. To stop the spirit it was necessary to burn the place that still tied him to this world. So returning to Transnistria, Svyatoslav, with the help of other Siberians, set fire to Rabbi Moisha’s house, and later to the synagogue too.

Zilya recovered, and the two of them continued to live in our district for a long time. They had six sons: two of them murdered policemen and died young in prison; one went to live in Odessa, and in time set up a flourishing trade in clothes with fake brand-names (he was the most successful of all the brothers); and the other three lived in our district and carried out robberies; the youngest of them, Zhora, belonged to the gang led by my father.

In their old age Svyatoslav and Zilya went to end their lives in the Tayga, as they had always wanted to do.

After the synagogue was burned down by the Siberians many Jews left the area. The last of them were deported by the Nazis during the Second World War, and all that remains of that community now is the old cemetery.

Abandoned for years, it became a desolate place, where rubbish was dumped and kids went to fight. The graves were looted by some members of the Moldovan community, who committed this outrage against the dead simply to get stone ornaments that they could use as decorations for the gates outside their houses: this custom was the origin of a very offensive proverb: ‘A Moldovan’s soul is as beautiful as his garden gate.’

In the 1970s the Ukrainians started building houses in the old Jewish quarter. A lot of promiscuous girls lived there, and we often had parties with them. All you had to do to pull a Balka girl was buy her a drink, because not having a strict upbringing like the girls of Low River they saw sex as just fun; but as often happens in these cases, their over-lax behaviour became a kind of malaise, and many of them remained trapped in their own sexual freedom. They usually started having sex at the age of fourteen, or even earlier. By the time they were eighteen each one of them was already known to the whole town; it was convenient for the men to have women who were always ready to sleep with them without asking for anything in exchange. It was a game, which lasted until the man got fed up with one and moved on to another.

When they grew to adulthood, many Balka girls became aware of their situation and felt a great emptiness; they too wanted to have a family, find a husband and be like other women, but that was no longer possible: the community had permanently branded them, and no worthy man would ever be able to marry them.

Those poor souls, realizing they could no longer enjoy the positive emotions that are given by a simple life, committed suicide in appalling numbers. This phenomenon of girls killing themselves was rather shocking for our town, and many men, when they realized the origin of their despair, refused to have sex with them, so as not to participate in the destruction of their lives.

I knew an old criminal from Centre called Vitya, who was nicknamed ‘Kangaroo’, because in his youth he had been wounded in the legs in a gunfight and ever since then had had a strange, hopping kind of walk. He was the owner of a number of nightclubs in various towns in Russia, and had always had a weakness for the girls of Balka. After the first cases of suicide Kangaroo was the first to guess the true extent of the problem, and vowed in front of a lot of people that he would no longer seek their company, and suggested the matter be discussed openly with the girls’ families. But the Ukrainians had a strange sense of dignity: they let their daughters put themselves in compromising situations, but then pretended they didn’t know anything about it and were furious if anyone spoke the truth. Consequently many of them were hostile to Kangaroo’s initiative, saying it was a plot to bring dishonour into their district. Later there were very unpleasant developments: some fathers actually killed their daughters with their own hands just to show others they didn’t accept any kind of interference.

The situation deteriorated partly because of the incredible consumption of alcohol by the people of that district. The Ukrainians drank a lot, a habit they shared with the rest of the Soviet population, certainly, but they did so in a particularly unrestrained manner, without the filter of tradition and without a trace of morality. In Siberia alcohol is drunk in obedience to certain reasonable rules, so as not to cause irreparable damage to one’s health: accordingly, Siberian vodka is made exclusively of wheat, and is purified with milk, which removes the residue of the manufacturing process, so that the final product has a perfect purity. Moreover, vodka must only be drunk with food (in Siberia people eat a lot, and dishes are very rich, because you burn off a large amount of fat in resisting the cold and preserving vitamins in winter): if you eat the right dishes, it is possible to drink as much as a litre of vodka per person without any problem. In Ukraine, however, they drink vodka of various kinds: they extract the alcohol from potatoes or pumpkins, and the sugary substances make you drunk at once. The Siberians never get too drunk, don’t pass out and don’t vomit, but the Ukrainians drink themselves unconscious, and it can take them as long as two days to work off the hangover.

So life in Balka, formerly the Jewish and later the Ukrainian quarter, was like one long party, but a party with a sad atmosphere, with a nostalgia for something simple and human which those people could no longer have.

My grandfather always used to say that this happens when men are forgotten by God: they remain alive, but are no longer really alive. My own opinion was that it was an extreme form of social degradation affecting the whole community, perhaps because the young people who had come to live in our town had broken violently away from their parents and had been left to themselves, and without any form of control they had burned themselves up, indulging in all kinds of vice. And, in turn, without the support of their old folk they brought up their own children badly.

The Ukrainians’ sons were notorious as mothers’ boys, and as people incapable of doing anything useful either for themselves or for others. In Bender nobody trusted them because they were always telling lies to make themselves seem important, but they did it so clumsily that no one could possibly have believed them: we just treated them as poor idiots. Some of them even tried to make money by inventing non-existent laws: for example, that a brother could force his sister to prostitute herself. The exploitation of prostitution had always been considered an offence unworthy of a criminal: men convicted of that kind of crime were liable to be killed in jail; it could happen outside as well, to tell the truth, but it was rare for them to get out of prison alive. The Ukrainians simply didn’t understand this; they would wander around the districts of the town, trying in vain to get into the bars and nightclubs. All doors were always closed to them, since the money they wanted to spend had been earned in an unworthy manner. They went on without stopping to wonder why, creating an increasingly deep rift between their community and the rest of the town.

There was only one road through the district of Balka, and by the side of it there was a kiosk run by an old Ukrainian criminal by the name of Stepan, who sold cigarettes, drinks, and now and then drugs, usually the kind you smoke. He would also sell you weapons and ammunitions from the Ukrainian military bases, which he obtained with the help of his elder brother, a career soldier.

Stepan was partially paralysed, because he had once drunk some alcohol intended for scientific use. When he told the story of that terrible day he always made a joke of it: as soon as he realized that the left side of his body was on the point of losing all feeling, he said, in the nick of time he’d flipped his ‘honourable member’ over to the right-hand side and thereby saved it.

I often stopped to chat with him, because I loved to see his spirit and his good humour even in his pretty desperate situation. He would sit all day in his wheelchair under a big umbrella, talking to the people who passed by. He had a daughter, perhaps the only respectable girl in the whole district, who looked after him and was studying to be an architect. His wife had left him shortly before he was paralysed; she had run off with her lover, a young male nurse. I respected Stepan for the simple fact that he had succeeded in bringing up his daughter while remaining exactly what he was, a simple, uneducated person, but to judge from the results also a good one, capable of transmitting his natural affability to others.

His kiosk was always open. By day he ran it himself, sometimes with his daughter’s help, and at night it was run by his trusty assistant, a boy by the name of Kiril, whom everybody called ‘Nixon’ because he was obsessed with American presidents. A lot of people said he was retarded, but I think he just liked to take things slowly. Stepan used to pay him in food and cigarettes. Nixon smoked, and did so in a very theatrical manner: he seemed like an actor. He also had a dog, a small, ugly and very nasty mongrel, who with the most humble and amiable of expressions on its face would bite your ankles when you were least expecting it. Nixon used to call him ‘my secretary’, or sometimes dorogoy gospodin, ‘my dear sir’. The dog had no other name.

If you got into conversation with Nixon he would start criticizing the communists, saying they wanted to destroy his country and calling them ‘dirty terrorists’. He said he didn’t trust anyone except his ‘secretary’, who would then demonstrate his devotion by knocking his disgustingly mangy little tail against his master’s leg.

‘The Arabs have pissed me off,’ he said, ‘and Fidel Castro should be killed, but that’s impossible. And do you know why? Because he’s hiding in Siberia, where he’s protected by the communists. They’ve replaced him in Cuba with a double who doesn’t even look like him: his beard is obviously false, and he smokes cigars without inhaling.’

That was the way Nixon was. ‘And do you know what the American flag represents?’ he would ask. ‘I’ll tell you: a dead communist. The stars are his brain, which was blown to smithereens when he was shot in the head, and the red and white stripes are his blood-spattered skin.’

He hated blacks – he said their presence had stopped the progress of democracy – and he got Martin Luther King mixed up with Michael Jackson, saying ‘he was a good nigger, he liked dancing and singing’, but that some other niggers had killed him just because one day he had decided to become a white.

When we approached the kiosk we found Nixon sitting on his presidential chair as usual, playing Tetris. I was the first to get out of the car, and when he saw me he ran over to to greet me, as he always did with people he liked. I gave him a hug and asked him to wake Stepan because it was urgent. He immediately rushed off to his house, which was only a few dozen metres away.

Nixon couldn’t stand having my friend Mel around: for some unknown reason he was convinced he was a spy; once he had even given him a couple of blows with an iron bar because he was so scared of him. Because of this I had told Mel to stay in the car and not show himself, so as not to stir up a quarrel in the middle of the night. However, when Nixon had gone to call Stepan, Mel had got out of the car to relieve himself in the nearby bushes. And while Mel peed, making a noise like a waterfall, Nixon arrived, pushing a wheelchair with a still half-asleep Stepan on it.

Since I knew Stepan better than the others did, I stayed to talk to him, with Speechless; the others either waited in the cars or drank beer by the kiosk.

Stepan must have guessed that something important was at stake, because he didn’t joke as he usually did. I apologized for waking him at that time of night and told him our sad story. As I talked I saw the living side of his face become a kind of mask, like the ones the Japanese use to represent their demons.

He was angry. When I mentioned the reward he made a contemptuous gesture with his hand and said he had something to give us. He called Nixon and gave him an order: the boy disappeared and returned after a few minutes with a cardboard box in his hands. Stepan gave it to me, saying he was a humble and poor person and couldn’t give us anything more, but in its own small way this was the most beautiful and useful thing he had.

He opened the box: inside was a Stechkin with silencer and stabilizer, and six magazines full of ammunition. A splendid and pretty expensive weapon: the only pistol made in the USSR that could fire a continuous burst, with twenty shots in the magazine.

I thanked him and said that if it was all right with him I would gladly pay for it, but Stepan refused, saying it was okay, all he asked was that I tell our elders about his gesture. He promised me he would keep his ears open, and that if he heard anything interesting he would let me know at once. Before leaving I tried at least to pay for what the boys had consumed at his kiosk – a few beers, cigarettes and some food – but again he wouldn’t hear of it. So I slipped a little money into the pocket of Nixon, who waved to us delightedly, like a little child, as we got into the cars.

Two hundred metres further on Mel was waiting for us: to avoid a clash with Nixon he had gone through the bushes, and he was angry, because in the darkness he’d got scratched all over his face.

Nobody wanted to take Stepan’s gun, because – it emerged – they all had at least two on them already. So I took it myself.

We were approaching Centre, and the dark of the night was becoming ever more transparent: day was breaking, the second day of our search.

In the car I slept for a while, without dreaming about anything in particular, as if I’d fallen into a void. When I woke up we were already in Centre and the cars had stopped in the yard of a house. Except for me and Mel, who was still asleep, the boys were all outside, talking to two guys by a door.

I got out of the car and went over to the others. I asked Grave what was happening and he replied that the two people Gagarin was talking to were assistants of the Guardian of Centre.

‘What have they been saying?’

‘That they don’t know anything about what happened by the phone boxes. And they haven’t heard anything about strangers pestering a girl in their district.’

Shortly afterwards the two guys went away.

‘Well?’ I asked Gagarin.

‘It’s a challenge for them now: admitting they know nothing about it is like admitting they’re out of the loop. It might land them in serious trouble, if that really is the case. Anyway, they’ve asked us to give them time to check all the facts. And not to tell the Guardian, for the time being. They’ve assured us of their complete cooperation. We’ve arranged to meet again at noon under the old bridge.’

So we got back into the car and decided to go and have breakfast in a place called Blinnaya, which means ‘The Pancake Parlour’, in the district called The Bank.

The Bank was situated in the most attractive part of the town, where there was a big park on the river with beaches and places where you could relax and pass the time pleasurably. The most expensive restaurants, bars and night clubs were all there. There was also a clandestine gambling den, where admission was strictly by invitation.

The district was run by various Bender criminals, and was a kind of tourist attraction: a lot of people came from Odessa – rich Jews and merchants of various kinds – because it was highly fashionable to breathe a bit of the scent of exotic criminality. But the real criminals of the town were forbidden to settle their personal scores in the Bank; if some people created a few problems or got a bit rowdy it was only an act put on specially for the guests, to make them believe they’d come to a disreputable area: a way of making them feel a bit threatened, to raise their adrenaline. In reality no one ever committed any serious crimes in that district.

The Blinnaya made the best pancakes in the whole town. In Russia pancakes are called bliny, and everyone has their own way of cooking them: the best ones are those made by the Cossacks of the Don, who add yeast to the mixture, which they then quickly scorch on red-hot pans smeared with butter, so that the bliny turn out thick and very greasy, crisp and with an unforgettable flavour.

There at the Blinnaya people ate them in the Siberian manner, with sour cream mixed with honey, drinking black tea with lemon.

We were pretty tired. There were quite a few people in the restaurant. We ordered fifty bliny, just to start with (on average a Russian will eat at least fifteen bliny at a time, and guys like Mel and Gagarin as many as three times that number). In three minutes the plate was empty. We ordered several more helpings. We took the tea straight from the samovar that stood on the table; every now and then the waiter came to add more water to it. That’s normal in my country: in many restaurants you can drink as much tea as you like; every person, however much food he orders, can drink all the tea he can get inside him, and it’s free.

As we ate and drank we discussed the situation. The morale of the group was fairly high, as was our anger and our desire for justice.

‘I can’t wait to break the back of the bastard who raped her,’ said Speechless.

I thought our situation must be really exceptional, seeing as that was the second time Speechless had spoken in two days.

Then I thought we were really a strange group. I thought about the lives each of us had led. Gigit and Besa, in particular.

Gigit was the son of a Siberian criminal; his mother was an Armenian woman who had died when he was six, murdered by one of her brothers because by marrying a Siberian criminal she had insulted the name of the family.

He was a bright boy, with a strong sense of justice: in fights he was always one of the first to enter the fray, so he had a lot of scars. A couple of times he had been wounded quite seriously, and on one of those occasions I had given him my blood, which is compatible with all groups. Since then he had been convinced that we had become blood brothers; he tried to watch my back in every situation, and would always be there when I needed him. We were friends; we understood each other almost without speaking. He was a quiet person; he liked reading, and I could talk to him about literature. Quiet up to a point, though: he had beaten a Centre boy to death with a hammer for trying to humiliate him in the eyes of a girl he wanted to impress – a girl Gigit had gone out with for a while and remained good friends with afterwards.

Besa was a real tough guy. He was a year younger than me, but looked much older, because he already had a lot of white hairs. He wasn’t born in our area; he came from Siberia. His mother, Aunt Svetlana, was the leader of a small gang of robbers, with whom she carried out turne, literally ‘tours’, series of robberies carried out from town to town. They used to rob rich people – local politicians, but especially the so-called ‘hidden industrialists’, people involved in illegal production and trade, who had links with the managers of the big factories. The phenomenon of a woman leading a gang was quite common in Siberia: women with a criminal role are affectionately called ‘mama’, ‘mama cat’ or ‘mama thief’, and are always listened to; their opinion is considered to be a perfect solution, a kind of pure criminal wisdom.

Besa’s mother had been in prison several times, and he had been born in the special-regime women’s prison of Magadan, in Siberia. Born in jail, he had experienced freedom for the first time at the age of eight. His prison upbringing was very obvious, and had left an indelible mark: an immense anger, above all.

Besa had never known his father. His mother said she had spent one night, out of pity, with a man who had been condemned to death, after being moved by train to the prison of Kurgan. She was put in a special block, and as soon as she arrived in her cell she received a letter from the next cell: a young boy nicknamed ‘Besa’, which means ‘little devil’, asked her to spend the night with him. Out of compassion and a sort of criminal solidarity she agreed to the condemned man’s request, and after paying the guards she was taken to his cell. She became pregnant. A few months later she learned through the prisoners’ secret mail system that the biological father of the son she was carrying in her womb had been executed a week after their meeting. So she decided to give him his name. All she knew about the man was that he had been a killer of policemen, that he had been good-looking and that he’d had a lot of white hairs; and Besa must have inherited them, because, as his mother used to say, he was as close a likeness to his father as Adam was to God the creator.

Ever since I’d known him Besa had had an obsession. In the prison where he had grown up he had heard from another child the story of the Kremlin star, the one on top of the main tower, where the gigantic clock is. According to the story, the star weighed five hundred kilos and was made of solid gold, but had been covered with red paint out of prudence. Many similar stories circulate among the children of criminals, especially in the juvenile prisons: they always concern a fabulous treasure hidden in some well-known place in full view of everyone and yet very hard to steal; but if you succeed in stealing it, it will set you up for life. One such story concerns the diamonds that Tsarina Catherine II is said to have hidden in the Bridge of Hope in Moscow, together with the body of her housekeeper, whom she is supposed to have killed with her own hands for trying to steal them. Another concerns the golden armour of the knight Elya of Murom, which is reputed to be buried under the monument of Tsar Alexander III in a monastery near Moscow.

All these stories were told in order to pass the time and create a mystery, but the mystery was always connected with criminal activity, so no one could say when you got to the end of the story that it had been a waste of time. After two hours of intrigue among the bourgeoisie, of descriptions of life in the Tsar’s palace, of wars, heroes, knights, ghosts, mysterious thieves, and murders committed with sophisticated techniques, there was always a treasure to be stolen: a treasure that was just waiting for someone to go and get it.

After such a story, nine times out of ten the listeners would ask:

‘Well, since you know the secret, why don’t you make use of it? Why don’t you get your hands on that treasure?’

The most effective answer was usually:

‘I’m an honest criminal; all I ask is that you give me a little cigarette money for telling you this story.’

Everyone would give a contribution and then they would start planning how to recover the treasure by destroying the national monuments. Besa was no exception: he, too, had worked out a plan for getting the star down from the Kremlin tower. Periodically he would go back to the plan to improve on it a little: for example, at first he didn’t know you couldn’t just walk into the Kremlin, and when he did find this out (thanks to me), he decided to fake some guards’ identity papers, kidnap five of them on their way to work and then enter the Kremlin disguised as guards. Initially he thought of lifting the star down with a crane, which he intended to steal from a building site. Then he decided on a more risky course: he would saw it off manually, after first securing it with ropes, then drop it down to the ground (after all, we didn’t care about its condition – we were going to break it up into pieces afterwards anyway, to extract the gold), and finally pick it up and put it into a car to carry it out of the Kremlin. To prevent the star making too much noise when it hit the ground it would be necessary, according to Besa’s plan, to cover it with rags.

Besa never stopped planning this crime of the century, and we had the honour of being included in his plan as assistants. He talked about it seriously, and given the vagaries of his fiery personality none of us dared to contradict him.

Meanwhile we continued our humble criminal activities without carrying out any crimes of the century. For the moment we were happy to participate in some black marketeering and try to keep Besa in the creative phase of his plan, so that he never reached the decisive phase, let alone the executive one. But lately he had grown rather restive – I think because he was beginning to realize that we weren’t particularly interested in stealing the Kremlin star.

Outside the Blinnaya, our stomachs full, we decided to split up. Gagarin would drive around the bars with Grave, Cat and Gigit, talking to the criminals of the district, while Mel, Speechless, Besa and I would go and see an old friend of my father’s, Uncle Fedya, who owned a megadisco on the other side of town and knew everything about everybody, and could even recount events that hadn’t yet happened, using his criminal sensibility and his knowledge of human nature.

Uncle Fedya was what in the criminal community is called a ‘Saint’. This is a term of the highest respect. A Saint is a person who lives according to very strict rules of self-control and tries in every sphere of his life to be a perfect example of the criminal ideal. The Saint lives in isolation from everyone, like a kind of hermit, and like the old Authorities he possesses nothing of his own; even the clothes he wears are not his, but gifts from other criminals. But unlike the Authorities he has no real power over other criminals, simply living his life as an example to them.

The Saint sends all his earnings into prison. Often the administrator of the obshchak – the criminals’ common fund – finds it difficult to satisfy everyone, especially in large prisons, where there are more than thirty thousand people and the structure is divided into hundreds of blocks. And often the assistants cannot agree among themselves how to divide up the funds. At that point it is always the Saint who supports them, because with his earnings he can get round any kind of internal conflict.

The Saint has no right to judge other criminals, and must remain neutral in all conflicts, but he may help to resolve them by communicating with all parties without getting personally involved. However, unlike the old Authorities he is allowed to touch money and commit crimes himself.

No one can become a Saint through his own wishes: it is a role that, like all roles in the criminal community, is given to you on the basis of your abilities and your particular talents.

The position of Saint is the rarest of all in the criminal community: in practice it is these men who administer the circulation of funds. It is they who collect the money from all the communities and send it to the prisons, either as cash or in the form of material aid. Consequently, Saints are closely protected.

In the whole of Bender there had only ever been three Saints. The first, Grandfather Dimyan, known as ‘Fur Hat’, died of old age in the late 1980s, and was a Siberian of our district. The second, Uncle Kostya, known as ‘Wood’, also from our district, was killed in a gun battle with the police in St Petersburg in the early 1990s. The third was Uncle Fedya, the last Saint of Bender.

He was a cheerful and very optimistic person; he seemed more like a monk than a criminal. In his youth he had killed three policemen and been condemned to death, but later the sentence had been reduced to life imprisonment. After he had spent thirty years inside a special-regime prison they had released him, judging him to be an ‘individual suitable for reintroduction into society’. He was over fifty by then. Soon he became a Saint. He organized various black market operations with a group of loyal Siberian criminals, and ran a bar. They lived together in the same house, without families: they were completely at the service of the criminal world; they helped people in prison and those who had just been released, and they supported the families of deceased criminals and elderly ones.

If anything happened in town you could be sure Uncle Fedya’s men would know about it. They were also in contact with prisoners held in even the most distant jails, as far away as Siberia, and could get any information they needed extremely quickly.

In view of their position in our society I thought it was very important to tell them what had happened. Even if it didn’t produce any positive leads for our inquiries, it would be a sign of respect on our part, and might win us some secondary assistance in gathering information.

We reached the Saint’s house. It was a kind of tenement block, with a yard and a fine garden full of small tables and benches. In accordance with the old tradition, the front door had been taken off its hinges and thrown on the ground, as a sign that the house was open to all, and indeed there were always guests; people came from all over the USSR to visit the Saint and his friends.

I too had often been a guest in that house, because my father was a good friend of Uncle Fedya’s. They had done business together and shared a passion for pigeons. My father used to give him pigeons because he couldn’t buy anything for himself: the Saint would keep them but say they were my father’s, and if in conversation I should let slip a compliment to one of ‘his’ pigeons, Uncle Fedya would always correct me, saying that those pigeons weren’t his, and that he only kept them because there was no room at our house.

As usual, Uncle Fedya was on the roof, where he kept ‘my father’s pigeons’ in a special shed. He saw me and beckoned to me to come up; I pointed to my companions and he repeated the gesture, inviting us all up. We went indoors and walked up three flights of stairs, greeting everyone we met, until we came to the door that led up to the roof. Before opening it we took off the weapons we were carrying, leaving them on a shelf on which there was a bucket of food for the pigeons. According to the rules, no one may appear before a Saint armed. You can’t even carry a knife, and that should be stressed, because usually the knife is regarded as a cult object, like the cross, which you must always have on you. Even the knife must be laid aside when you meet a Saint, to emphasize each criminal’s position with respect to his power, which is greater than that of force and of money.

While we were leaving our guns and knives, Mel saw me putting Grandfather Kuzya’s Nagant on the shelf. He looked amazed and asked me where I’d got it.

‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said. ‘It’s a long story.’

I opened the little door and at last we went up the narrow stairway that led to the roof. Uncle Fedya was standing there among the pigeons, which were pecking at grains of wheat; he had a pair of pigeons in his hand. I noticed that they were of the Baku breed, so they would be good at flying and especially at ‘hitting’ – that’s what we call the way the males of some breeds have of displaying their agility to attract the attention of the females.

We greeted Uncle Fedya, and my friends introduced themselves. As tradition requires, first I had to talk for a while about matters which had nothing to do with our visit: this is not just a formal rule; it is done to enable you to assess the other person’s state of mind and to judge whether that is the right moment for discussing the matter that is your main concern. So I asked him about his health and made some small talk about pigeons, until he asked me what brought me there.

‘I came for “a bit of a chat”,’ I replied.

In conversation, especially with important figures in the criminal world, it is usual to talk ironically about the problems you need their help in solving. In the same way the Authorities themselves never begin discussions about their life or about some personal question as if they were matters of the greatest importance: they speak of themselves with lightness and humility. For example, if you ask a criminal how his affairs are going, he will answer ironically that his affairs are all under investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s office, and that he is only occupying himself with bagatelles, trifles, matters of no importance.

That is why I was obliged to present our problem rather nonchalantly, saying that I’d come for a ‘bit of a chat’, something of no great consequence.

He smiled and said he already knew what had happened. He asked me to tell him how our inquiries were going. Briefly, and without going into too much detail, I explained the situation to him; he listened calmly and patiently, but now and then he sighed heavily.

When I had finished he stood motionless for a while, thinking it over; then suddenly he said it would be better if we went downstairs and sat at the table and drank some chifir, because ‘it’s hard to find the truth standing up’.

We went downstairs with him. There were already two old criminals sitting at the table, whom Uncle Fedya at once introduced to us. They were guests of his who had come from a little Siberian village on the River Amur.

The tea ceremony began.

Uncle Fedya prepared the chifir himself. All his teeth were dark, almost black: an unmistakable sign of the habitual chifir drinker. After heating the water on the wood stove, he took the chifirbak off the fire, put it on the table and poured a whole packet of Irkutsk tea into it.

As we waited for the chifir to brew, Uncle Fedya recounted our story to his guests, who listened to him sadly. One of the two, a big, strong man with a tattooed face, crossed himself every time Ksyusha’s name was mentioned.

Uncle Fedya poured the chifir into the mug, took three long swigs and passed it on to me. It was strong and boiling hot and ‘caught’ well: that’s what we say when the chifir has an immediate effect, giving a slight sensation of light-headedness. We passed the chifir round three times; Mel took the last swig, then washed the mug, as tradition prescribes.

Finally Uncle Fedya put on the table a dish of sweets, perfect for tempering the strong taste of chifir that remained in the mouth. My favourites were those that had the flavour of klyuchva, a very sour berry that grows on small bushes in northern Russia, exclusively in marshy areas. As we ate the sweets we started talking again.

Uncle Fedya said that the people who ran his clubs already knew the whole story, and that if any interesting news had been reported at ‘The Cage’ – the largest and most spectacular disco in town, where large numbers of people went – they would certainly have passed it on to him at once.

Then he laid on the table his financial contribution to the cause. One of the guests immediately imitated him, producing a pack of dollars – no less than ten thousand; and finally, without a word, the Siberian giant with the tattooed face, who was known as ‘Cripple’, added another five thousand.

Uncle Fedya also gave us a couple of tips: he advised us to go back to the district of Bam.

‘It’s hard to have an honest conversation with those people; terror tactics are better,’ he said, winking at me. ‘If you fire a few shots and someone gets killed, it won’t matter; they’d kill each other anyway, sooner or later. If you scare them they’ll actually start doing something, and who knows, in the midst of all the trash that lives there perhaps they’ll find your man.’

He also advised us to put more pressure on the people of Centre; after all, it was partly their fault if the girl had been raped in their territory. In his opinion – and people like the Saint were rarely mistaken – all the leaders of Centre might as well ‘write letters home’ – that is, prepare for a violent clash with the unknown.

Uncle Fedya didn’t approve of Gagarin’s generous decision to give the Centre boys half a day to gather information without the Guardian’s knowledge.

‘For the love of Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘what do we care if the Guardian is angry with them? He’d be perfectly right to be angry, because they’re a bunch of incompetent fools. These people of Centre only think about womanizing and playing cards; they look like gipsies with all the gold they wear, and then, when something happens in their area, they’re left with the shit between their legs, stinking in front of the whole town… No, you go straight to the Guardian now, and tell him that if he doesn’t bring you by this evening the idiots who’ve been causing trouble in his area while he and his men were sleeping, you’ll tell all the Authorities about the matter… They’ll bring them to you on a blue-edged salver, you’ll see…’

While he was saying all this, I was already imagining the scene. We wouldn’t even be allowed to see the Guardian of Centre, let alone rebuke him and threaten him. However, as my late lamented uncle used to say: ‘A person who takes no risks drinks no champagne.’

Thanking Uncle Fedya for his hospitality, his excellent advice and the money for increasing the reward, we went to join the rest of our group so that we could plan our rendezvous with the Centre guys.

We had arranged to meet the others at a bar owned by old Plum, a criminal who hadn’t participated in any criminal activities for a long time and just ran his bar, or rather, sat at a table drinking or eating, while two young girls, his granddaughters, did all the work.

Plum was well known in the town for the life of hardship and suffering that he had led. He wasn’t born into a criminal family: his parents were educated people, intellectuals – his father was a scientist, and his mother taught literature at the University of Moscow. In the late 1930s, when Stalin’s regime unleashed a wave of terror, his parents were arrested and declared enemies of the people. His father was accused of having links with American and British spies, his mother of anti-Soviet propaganda. The whole family, including the two children – Plum, who was twelve at that time, and his sister Lesya, who was only three – were deported to the gulag of Vorkuta.

There the communist comrades, patriots and builders of peace throughout the land, subjected political prisoners to the most inhuman tortures. Plum’s father, who was physically very weak, died in the train from the beatings he had taken, and a bad attack of pneumonia. When they arrived in Vorkuta, the mother and the two children were not separated, but only because the children’s block had not been built yet. They lived in Vorkuta for a long time, seeing many people die around them of cold, disease, parasites, mistreatment and malnutrition.

Plum told how one day he, his sister and his mother had been taken to a place where the so-called ‘special squad of internal investigators’ operated: a gang of butchers who tortured condemned people – not in order to obtain information, but for ‘re-educational’ reasons. The mother was made to strip and to undress her children in front of the guards, after which they had started to beat her, standing the children in a corner and forcing them to watch their mother being tortured. Then those animals took Plum and invented a game: they told him that if his mother didn’t break his sister’s little finger with her own hands, they would break all his fingers, one by one. In a long and terrible process of torture, they broke six of his fingers in front of his mother. He said he had been terrified and kept screaming that he couldn’t stand any more, and eventually his mother, in a fit of madness and desperation, took little Lesya, whom she was holding in her arms, and dashed her head against the wall. Then she tried to kill him too, but the cops managed to stop her and beat her savagely. She was never to leave that block alive.

Plum was thrown outside on the snow to die of cold, with his fingers broken, and half-dead. He said the only thing he had hoped for was to die as soon as possible, so he had started to eat the snow, in order to freeze more quickly. At that time a group of ordinary prisoners were working nearby, cutting wood to build the huts that were needed for the enlargement of the gulag. When they saw the little boy in the snow they picked him up and took him under their protection. The guards turned a blind eye because in the gulags the ordinary prisoners – at least at the beginning, before the Soviet penitentiary system became a kind of perfect mechanism, a production line – were treated differently from the political ones. They were criminals and the administration feared them because they were united and very well organized, and if they wanted to they could start a real rebellion.

So Plum went to live with them in the huts. One of them healed his broken fingers by putting sticks of soft wood along them and carefully binding them on. From that day onwards the criminals looked after him and brought him up. They called him ‘Plum’ because of the colour of his face, which was always blue because he was always cold.

At the age of sixteen Plum became the ‘executor’ of the gang that had found him and taken him in. A war had broken out among the criminals in the camp, between those who supported the old Authorities – who included Plum’s friends – and those who proclaimed themselves to be new Authorities, proposing new rules. The latter were in the majority; they came from the lowest social classes and belonged to the generation of war orphans; they represented a criminal reality which had never been seen before, there or anywhere else in Russia, where characteristics such as ignorance, ferocity and the absence of moral laws were respected. One night Plum and his friends entered the huts of the shigany – the young, unscrupulous criminals – and stabbed them to death as they slept. Before the victims even realized what was happening half the hut had been killed.

Plum killed enormous numbers of people; I may be mistaken, but I suspect that is why he survived. Perhaps he managed to stay sane, despite the terrible trauma of his childhood, by giving vent to his anger in this way. Plum endured many prisons and also lived a long time as a free man, always acting as a criminal executor. He married a good woman and had three sons and two daughters. On his right hand, where they had broken his fingers, he had a tattoo of a skull with a policeman’s hat. On its forehead was written: ‘Az vozdam’, which in the old Russian language means ‘I will avenge myself’.

I don’t know if he did avenge himself, but he was constantly killing policemen. He had a huge collection of badges of the police officers and members of the security forces he had killed during his career. He kept them on a large dresser in the red corner of his house, under the icons, where there was also a photograph of his family with a candle always burning in front of it.

I saw the collection with my own eyes. It was staggering. Dozens of badges of all periods, from the Fifties to the mid-Eighties – some blood-stained, others with bullet-holes in them. They were all there: policemen from the forces of towns all over Russia, members of special units formed to combat organized crime, KGB agents, prison guards, agents of the Public Prosecutor’s office.

Plum said there were more than twelve thousand of them, but that he hadn’t been able to recover the badges in every case. He remembered everything about each man with total precision: how and when he’d killed him. As I gazed at them, he kept repeating to me:

‘Take a good look at them, son, these murderers’ faces… Human tears never fall on the ground: the Lord catches them first.’

He said he had told his daughters to send those badges after his death to the Ministry of the Interior in Moscow, accompanied by a letter which he had been writing and rewriting all his life.

He showed me the letter. It wasn’t so much a letter as an entire notebook in which he explained almost everything: the story of his life, the reasons for his anger, his view of the world. At the end he revealed the places where he had hidden the bodies of some policemen, and wrote that he was performing a generous act, because this would make it possible for the dead to have their graves, and even though many years had passed their families would know where to go and mourn them, whereas he had not been given the chance to weep on the graves of his father, his mother and his sister.

One section of that notebook contained his poems, which were very simple, naive, even coarse, in a sense, if you didn’t consider the story that lay behind them. I remember one addressed to his little sister Lesya, perhaps the longest of all. He called her ‘innocent angel of Our sweet Lord’, and said that she smiled as ‘the sky smiles after the rain’, that her hair ‘shone like the sun’ and had the colour of ‘a field of wheat that asks to be harvested’. He told her in simple and affectionate words, with no attempt at rhyme, how much he loved her; and he asked her to forgive him for not being able to hold out when the policemen were breaking his fingers, because he was ‘small, only a child who was afraid of pain, like all children’. He told her that their mother’s action, in dashing her head against the wall, had been ‘the generous gesture of an affectionate mother who is driven to desperation; I know that you understand her and that now the two of you are together in Heaven with Our Lord’.

You could tell from the poem how simple and in many respects primitive, and yet how beautiful and generous Plum’s soul was.

Now that he was old and his wife was dead, Plum was lonely. He always sought the company of the others in the bar, telling them stories about his life and showing them the life-size portrait of his family that he kept there.

I enjoyed talking to him; he was always ready to share his wisdom and teach me something.

It was thanks to him that I had learned to fire a pistol properly; my father, my uncle and my grandfather had taught me before, but I was too weak, and my hands were small and delicate, so when I fired I couldn’t control the weapon very well – I gripped it too tightly. He took me down to the river, where you could shoot freely into the water without having to worry about hurting anyone, and said to me:

‘Relax your hand, lad.’

We used the Tokarev 7.62, a quite large and powerful but well-balanced gun which didn’t have much kick in the hand. Later he also taught me to shoot with the two-handed Macedonian method, so called because the ancient Macedonians fought with a sword in each hand.

So I often went to see him. Apart from anything else, one of his granddaughters was a good friend of mine, and made the best apple cakes in the whole town.

When we reached Plum’s bar our friends hadn’t arrived yet. He was at his table, as usual; he was having tea with cake and reading a book of poems. As soon as he saw me he put it down, came to meet me and gave me a hug:

‘How are you, son? Have you caught him yet?’

He knew everything already, and I was relieved about that: at least I wouldn’t have to retell that story, which I found very painful to put into words.

I told him we were still looking for the culprit, and he immediately offered me help, money and weapons.

I replied that we had already collected more than enough money, and probably more than enough guns. But, as they say in Siberia, ‘so as not to offend the deaf old tiger, you must make a bit of noise when you walk’, so I added:

‘However, if you spread the word round among your customers and keep your ears open, it might be useful. And some of your granddaughter’s cake with a cup of tea would be a great comfort.’

Soon afterwards we were all sitting round a table eating cake and drinking tea with lemon, which was just what we needed after Uncle Fedya’s chifir. And that cake – as soon as you bit it, it melted in your mouth.

We discussed the advice that Uncle Fedya had given us. We all agreed with his words, and we realized that if we’d gone to see him earlier we would have saved ourselves a lot of time.

In the meantime the others arrived: they seemed tired – exhausted, in fact; Grave seemed even deader than usual, and when I looked at him I noticed that he had a faint bruise under his left eye. They were clearly excited.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

Gagarin told us that while they were doing the rounds of the bars they had walked straight into the louts Mino had told us about. There were seven of them, in a black four-by-four with a Ukrainian numberplate. ‘We asked them if we could speak to them,’ he said, ‘but instead of replying they started shooting at us. And one them hit Grave in the face with a Japanese thing.’

‘With a what?’ asked Besa.

‘A kind of combat stick. You know, those things you see in martial arts films, the ones they whirl around really fast in their hands… When they drove off we tried to stop them – we fired at their car – but it was no good…’

‘I hit one of them in the head, though, I could swear it,’ added Gigit.

‘The Wheel arrived with the car, but it was too late – the four-by-four had already gone,’ said Gagarin. ‘So I stopped at a phone box and called home to ask our elders to have road-blocks set up in all districts, to stop the car before it leaves town.’

As I looked at Grave’s sad face, battered by a weapon straight out of a Japanese–American action film, and listened to that tale of gun fights and car chases, for a moment I thought we were all going mad. Then suddenly I felt an urge to do something, to move, to act. But, as my late uncle used to say, ‘the mother cat doesn’t give birth when she wants to, but when her time comes’.

I told Gagarin what Uncle Fedya had said.

‘When I was talking to those two I did have my suspicions,’ he said. ‘They seemed to be hiding something. They wanted to get rid of us; they needed to gain time so they could do something… But what?’

We decided to go to the meeting-place anyway, under the old bridge.

‘But to be on the safe side, Gagarin,’ I said, ‘maybe it’s better if we don’t all go. A group of three would be best, don’t you think? And better go on foot, so we can split up if there’s any trouble…’

Gagarin agreed:

‘Okay, but one of those three has to be me.’

‘Better not,’ said Mel. ‘You were appointed by the elders; you’re the leader of the mission. If anything happens to you the situation will only get worse.’

After a brief discussion we decided that Mel, Besa and I would go, and the others would wait nearby, ready to spring into action if necessary.

While we were in the car we made a plan: I would walk to the middle of the meeting place, under the old bridge, and watch the area in front and to the left, Mel would walk on the right and look to that side (after all, he only had a right eye), and Besa would bring up the rear and bend down occasionally to do up his shoelaces, to check the situation behind us.

We parked in a narrow street near the bridge; the others stayed in the car to wait for us. We spread out as we had agreed and walked slowly down towards the bridge, pretending to be just out for a stroll.

We had deliberately arrived ten minutes late, to keep the guys who were waiting for us guessing.

But when we reached the bridge there was no one there. We walked around the area, then went back to the cars.

Now we really would have to go and see the Guardian of Centre and say the things Uncle Fedya had recommended we say. It was obvious that his two assistants had done something really stupid, and that that was why they had played this trick on us.

We were flying towards Centre like a squadron of bombers. Furious and grim-faced, we already imagined the trouble there would be in town when our mission was completed. Mel and I even discussed the destiny of the Guardian, as if it were in our hands.

‘They’ll kill him for sure,’ said Mel. ‘He can’t go unpunished after this demonstration of weakness. Being tricked by your assistants is worse than being a rat yourself.’

‘I reckon they’ll only lower him,’ I said. ‘They’ll make him move to Bam, where he’ll rot until the day some bastard kills him for his golden chain.’

It’s not very normal for two teenagers to speculate about the future of an experienced Authorities.

In the criminal world it’s preferable to avoid getting into this kind of situation; even if everything around you is wrong and you’re sure you’re right, before turning your decisions into actions it’s as well to ‘cross yourself thirty times’, as my grandfather used to say.

To be sitting on the crest of the highest wave in the sea is very nice, but how long can such a wave last? And what happens when that brute you’re riding smashes you like a tiny parasite?

I always ask myself questions like that when I feel the need to jump on a large and violent wave.

Some criminals, when they sense that the ground is crumbling beneath their feet, forget all the splendid, equitable laws of nature, and then the lead starts to fly and you can’t be sure of anything.

I warned the others that we were going into an area controlled by a man who didn’t have the slightest respect for us, since according to his rules under-age teenagers counted for nothing. But what might happen if those same teenagers caused him to lose his power? He wouldn’t just let us go home in peace after humiliating him. He might declare an all-out war, turning us from hunters into quarry. We might seem – and even be – as tough as we liked, but if the ten of us had to fight a whole district whose Guardian had gone crazy and hated us, we’d be slaughtered like pigs on New Year’s Day.

When we reached Centre, we found an enormous number of cars parked outside the bar we had visited at the start of our tour. So they were all there, perhaps waiting for us, perhaps discussing the situation. I sensed from the way the wind was blowing, from the breeze in our faces, that we were already riding the wave.

I looked at Gagarin as I climbed out of the car. I was worried about his state of mind, since he was going to have to talk on our behalf, and it was on his word, and the way he said it, that our future depended.

He seemed relaxed, and his sly smile told me he had a plan.

We didn’t say anything to each other, so as not to seem indecisive in front of the others, who were now looking at us as we entered the bar.

All the people of Centre were sitting round a table eating and drinking, with Pavel the Guardian in the middle. He had a furious expression on his face, and was violently attacking a pork chop, spraying fat all over the place. Next to him was the troublemaker who had insulted us on our previous visit. As soon as he saw us he got up and started shouting wildly: ‘What the hell do you want?’, and throwing various insults at us.

We stood still, and the thug came towards us; now and then he turned back towards the table to see his master’s face, to assess whether he approved of his behaviour. Pavel seemed indifferent; he went on eating, as if we didn’t exist.

When the guy reached Gagarin and started shouting right in his face, Gagarin’s left hand shot out and grabbed him by the neck – which was long and thin, like a turkey’s – while his right hand slowly extracted his Tokarev from his pocket.

With one hand round the neck of this guy – who was trying to punch him but couldn’t reach him and looked like a insect impaled on a needle – and the other holding his gun, Gagarin didn’t take his eyes off Pavel. Then he raised his right hand and held it in that position for a moment: the fool started squealing like a wounded animal, trying to turn his face as far away as possible from the probable trajectory of Gagarin’s right hand. But in vain. Suddenly that hand started hitting him in the face with the gun with terrible force and speed. The blows rained down.

The guy’s face became one big wound. He passed out and his legs fell limp, but Gagarin still held him up by the neck and kept hitting him over and over again in the same place. Then, as suddenly as he had started, he stopped hitting him and dropped him on the floor like a sack. Ten seconds later he started kicking him. It was a massacre.

When Gagarin had finished, he went over to the table where Pavel was sitting, with a face like thunder. At this point, I realized that we all had our guns in our hands.

Gagarin hooked a seat towards himself with his foot, sat down on it, and without giving the people of Centre time to get over their confusion at his mauling of the thug, started insulting Pavel. He used very offensive words. He spoke to him as you speak to a person whose fate is sealed.

It was very risky, but if the terror tactics worked, if we succeeded in creating a division among Pavel’s people, we would be all right. No self-respecting criminal will support a Guardian who because of his own mistakes is on the brink of ruin, so we were deliberately separating him from his people.

The decision Gagarin had taken was an extreme one, and it was a good thing he hadn’t told us about it in advance, because we would certainly have opposed it. But now that he’d started we were going to have to give him our full support, or we’d be in a real mess.

The essence of what Gagarin was saying to Pavel was simple: he was rebuking him for incompetence, but above all he was insulting him, to humiliate him in the eyes of his companions.

His approach was working: the expression on Pavel’s face had changed, he had gone very pale and his posture had altered too: he had been sitting with his shoulders erect and his chest puffed out, but now his shoulders had fallen, his chest had caved in and his whole body seemed shrunken. Only his eyes continued to glare with the same anger and contempt as before.

Gagarin told him he had been rude to us from the outset simply because we weren’t adults, ignoring the fact that we had come as representatives of our district and of the entire Siberian community, and ignoring the fact that our mission was trying to resolve a situation which all the communities worthy to be called criminal considered extremely serious.

He said he had told our elders what had happened that morning – that Pavel had refused to talk to us and had sent us two of his assistants, who had proved untrustworthy, since they had made an appointment with us which they had failed to keep. This called into question his very Authority, because it was clear that either he was a Guardian who had no control over affairs in his district, or – even worse – he was trying to conceal important information from us.

‘The only thing we’re interested in is in carrying out our mission,’ said Gagarin to everyone present. ‘It’s not our responsibility to deal with everything else. The Authorities have been informed and will take their decisions: that’s the important thing.’

While Gagarin was speaking Pavel glared at him scornfully, then suddenly he exploded in a fit of rage. He threw a dirty handkerchief at him, hitting him full in the face, then stood up and repeated the act he had performed on our previous visit: he ripped open his shirt, displaying his chest covered with old tattoos and with golden chains that hung down to his navel, and shouting a torrent of words in criminal slang the gist of which, leaving aside the profanities and insults, was:

‘Since when have little boys been allowed to argue with adult criminals?’

Then he kept repeating the same phrase over and over again:

‘Do you want to shoot an Authority? Well, shoot me, then!’

Gagarin stood motionless; I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

I noticed that Pavel’s people were planning something; one had left the table and gone towards the kitchen. Meanwhile Pavel came over to us and went along the line, shouting in each of our faces, asking if we still wanted to kill him.

Mel and the others kept still and silent; it was very clear that they didn’t want to make a false move and were waiting for an order or a signal from Gagarin, who sat motionless at the table, with his back turned.

When Pavel came to me and I smelled his breath, reeking of wine and onions, coming out of his disgusting mouth together with the same words as before, I pulled Grandfather Kuzya’s Nagant out of my pocket. Putting it against the brute’s fat cheek and pressing so hard that the end of the barrel sunk into the skin of his face, which was distorted with surprise, I said:

‘Grandfather Kuzya loaded this for me, do you understand? He said I could kill anyone who stops me catching the person who raped our sister. Even an Authority, if necessary.’

He stood rooted to the spot and glared at me with eyes full of anger, but also of sadness. Gagarin got up from the table and announced to all present that we were going to leave the district and that we would take Pavel with us, to make sure no one took a shot at us as we left.

A man stood up. His face was disfigured by a long scar which started from his forehead, ran across his right eye and nose and ended on his neck. Very calmly he said to us:

‘No one will hurt you; we had already agreed on that before you came. We were intending to report Pavel to the Authorities.’

Little by little it emerged from his explanation that Pavel, with the help of some people who had already been locked up in a safe place, had planned a series of murders and other violent acts to provoke a war among the various communities. His aim was to gain control of the trafficking of alcohol, which was in the hands of a group of old criminals from various districts.

While the man with the scar was talking Pavel had turned pale, and with my pistol stuck into his cheek I could feel through the steel how much he was trembling. It was the end for him, and he knew it.

The man introduced himself as ‘Paunch’. I had never heard of him. From his way of talking and standing, with his back bent and his head leaning forward, I realized that he had recently come out of prison. He confirmed this shortly afterwards: he had been released less than a month earlier, he said; and he added that when he was inside many had complained about the way Pavel supported the prison. He only sent aid to people he had chosen himself, he had never visited anyone and he had actually encouraged some internal wars, which had proved devastating. So on instructions from some elderly criminals Paunch had infiltrated Pavel’s gang to check up on it and report back.

In other words we were talking to a voydot, a criminal executor and investigator who answered only to the old Authorities, and whose task it was to uncover injustices committed by the young Authorities and the Guardians.

It was the first time in my life I’d seen a person on such an assignment; usually they kept their identity secret, though of course Paunch might not have been his real name.

Paunch went on with his story: he said Pavel had hired a group of young Ukrainians to stir up trouble. During the past month they had killed two people, and no one had been able to trace them because everything had been organized to make it seem like an attack carried out by another district – a declaration of war. These were the same methods the police had used years before.

I couldn’t believe my ears; the situation seemed surreal.

‘What about Ksyusha? Why did they rape her?’ I asked.

‘Just for fun. Because they were out of their minds. There was no other reason,’ replied Paunch. ‘But it roused your community, so Pavel tried to keep them hidden, but they went on causing trouble all over the place.’

Everyone had seen them; they’d left traces everywhere. Gagarin and the others had clashed with them, and after the shoot-out they had tried to get out of town, taking the road through Balka. Stepan too had reported their presence in that district; they had taken cigarettes and beers from his kiosk without paying and beaten up Nixon, but he had managed to hurt one of them with his iron bar – which was quite a surprise for a disabled man. But a group of Armenians had been waiting for them at the entrance into Caucasus. They had tried to drive their four-by-four through an orchard, and had knocked down one Armenian, but then they had crashed into a little river that ran between Caucasus and Balka.

All this had happened in the space of two hours, and now these thugs were in the hands of the Armenians, who Paunch said were waiting for us.

Paunch said we would have to go there together, because he needed them to confirm in the presence of three witnesses that they had been paid by Pavel: only then could he take him before the old Authorities for judgement.

‘You keep Pavel until you’re sure what he’s told you is true,’ he concluded.

One of us, therefore, would have to give up his place to Pavel and go in another car with Paunch. Without giving the others time to make up their minds, I volunteered.

We went in a car driven by a boy from Centre.

‘Are you really so keen to kill those people?’ Paunch asked me when we had set off.

I thought this over for a moment before replying:

‘I’m not a murderer; I get no pleasure out of killing. I just want justice to be done.’

Paunch didn’t reply; he just nodded and turned towards the window. He remained like that, still and silent, until we reached Caucasus. He seemed struck by what I had said, but I wasn’t sure whether he agreed or not.

When we arrived in Caucasus we drove to the house of an old Armenian called Frunzich. I knew him; he was a good friend of my grandfather’s; he had been one of the organizers of the armed revolt of the prisoners in the Siberian gulags in 1953. He’d had a very sad life, but had never lost his cheerful disposition: even a short conversation with him left you feeling full of energy.

Frunzich was waiting for us in a car outside the front door of his house, with three other Armenians – young guys; one was only a teenager. When he saw us coming he switched on the ignition and drove off in front of us, to lead the way.

He took us to an old military warehouse on the outskirts of the district, where fields and patches of woodland began. It had been built by the Germans in the Second World War and had a number of basements which were often used by various criminals for dirty business, when it was necessary to shed a bit of blood.

In the yard there were about twenty Armenians, men and boys, all armed with rifles or Kalashnikovs. They were standing around a very battered four-by-four; its windscreen was smashed and a door on the right-hand side was missing. Inside the four-by-four sat five men. They looked terrified, and for some reason were stark naked.

Their clothes were piled up in front of the car near two bodies. One had a still bleeding wound in its neck, the other a hole in its head, from which the blood had stopped flowing.

I got out of the car after Paunch and went over to stand beside my friends, who were looking with interest at the faces of those five still alive animals.

‘They’re all ours. But first it’s Paunch’s turn,’ said Gagarin.

Before I had time to wonder how Paunch was going to make them talk I saw Pavel collapse on the ground, felled by a very hard kick.

Lying there on the ground Pavel cut a pitiful figure. He reminded me of a fat little boy who had once lived in our district: this kid was clumsy in his movements, not so much because of his weight but because of the weakness of his character. He was convinced that he was practically disabled and was always falling over, sometimes deliberately, so he could attract the attention of others and cry and moan about his physical state. A few years later this pathetic great lump discovered that nature had endowed him with an artillery piece as long and powerful as the Dragunov precision rifle, and he abandoned his childish weaknesses. Especially with girls, whom he changed as frequently as a gentleman who is fastidious about personal hygiene changes his socks.

I always used to laugh when I thought about that boy, but now the association aroused a strange feeling of anger in me. Yes, I was angry. I had suddenly realized that although we were only one step away from completing our mission I felt no particular emotion, nothing. My only feelings were anger and weariness, two almost primitive, very animal sensations. I felt no higher human emotions at all.

There was Pavel, curled up on the ground, being beaten by the others. I looked at him and reflected that there was nothing certain and definite in life; this piece of human garbage, which now looked like a piece of meat being pounded into a steak, had only a short time before been full of its own importance and held real power in its hands.

When they had finished beating him up they loaded him into the boot of the car, as the rule requires because, since he was now tainted, he could no longer share the same space with honest criminals.

I don’t think those five thugs sitting naked in the off-roader knew what was about to happen to them. I don’t know what was going through their heads, but I looked at them and they seemed unconscious, as if they were under the effect of some drug.

I was sorry. I had thought so much of that moment. I had imagined the fear in their eyes, the words with which they would beg us to spare their lives, ‘We don’t want to die, have mercy…’, and the words I would say in reply, constructing an elaborate speech that would make them realize the enormity of the crime they had committed and ensure that they spent their last moments in pure terror, feeling something resembling what Ksyusha had felt. But I only saw indifferent faces, which seemed to be urging us to get on with what we had come to do. Perhaps it was only my impression, because my friends seemed happy enough. They approached the four-by-four with satisfied smiles and pulled out their guns demonstratively. They loaded them so slowly you could hear the bullets slip out of the magazines and enter the barrels, clicking into place.

I looked at Mel: he was walking behind Gagarin. He had two pistols in his hand and his ugly face was twisted into a cruel scowl.

I grasped Grandfather Kuzya’s Nagant and cocked it with my thumb. The drum turned and stopped with a loud click. I felt the trigger rise under my index finger: it was ready, taut.

In the other hand I had the Stechkin. Using the reloading technique I had been taught by Grandfather Plum I gripped it, released the safety catch with my index finger, pushed the rear sight against the edge of my belt and heard the mechanism move, pushing the fixed part forward and loading the bullet into the barrel.

As I concentrated on the four-by-four, trying to decide which bastard to shoot first, Gagarin, without any concluding speech or warning, opened fire with both his guns. Immediately – almost simultaneously – the others fired, and I realized that I was firing too.

Grave fired with his eyes closed, and very fast. He emptied the magazines of his Makarovs before anyone else and stood there motionless, still holding the two pistols raised in the direction of the car, watching how those five guys were taking all our anger as it hit them in the form of lead.

Gagarin, by contrast, fired relaxedly, calmly, letting his bullets find their own route, without aiming carefully.

Mel fired, as he always did, chaotically, trying to reproduce the effect of a burst of machinegun fire with his pistol and sending lead in all directions. As a result no one ever dared to stand in front of him during a gunfight, except Gagarin, because he had a natural trust in Mel which was like a sixth sense.

Cat fired with such dedication and concentration he didn’t realize his tongue was sticking out; he was trying his best, putting everything into it.

Gigit fired well, with absolute precision, without hurrying; he would take aim carefully, fire two or three shots, pause, then calmly take aim again.

Besa fired like the gunfighters of the Wild West, holding his guns at hip level and shooting with the regularity of a clock; he didn’t hit very much but he looked impressive.

I fired without thinking too much about it, adopting my usual Macedonian technique. I didn’t take aim, I fired at where I knew the guys were, and watched their dying convulsions.

Suddenly one of them opened a door and started running desperately towards the warehouse, then dashed down a corrugated iron tunnel, a narrow passage through which the daylight filtered, a kind of lighted street in the darkness. He ran with such energy that we stopped, rooted to the spot.

Mel fired a few shots after him but didn’t hit him. Then Gagarin went over to an Armenian boy, a teenager, who was holding a Kalashnikov in his hands, and asked him if he could borrow his rifle ‘for a second’. The boy, clearly shocked by what he had seen, passed him his Kalashnikov, and I noticed his hand was shaking.

Gagarin put the rifle to his shoulder and fired a long burst in the direction of the fugitive. The guy had already covered some thirty metres when the bullets hit him. Then Gagarin set off towards him, walking as if he were out for a stroll in the park. When he got close he fired another burst at the body lying on its back on the ground, which gave another twitch and then lay still.

Gagarin grabbed him by one foot and dragged him over to the car, putting him next to the other two bodies which had been there since the beginning of the massacre.

In the car there were four corpses disfigured by wounds. The four-by-four was riddled with holes and the air was slowly hissing out of one tyre. There was blood everywhere: splashes, pools spreading out on the ground to a radius of five metres, drips that fell from the car onto the floor, mingling with the petrol and becoming rivulets which ran towards us, under our feet.

There was total silence; none of those present said anything; everyone stood motionless, looking at what was left of those men.

We left the four-by-four and the bodies in the place where we had performed that act of justice.

Afterwards we went to old Frunzich’s house. Paunch had to leave, but before going he said goodbye to us warmly and respectfully, saying we had done something that needed to be done.

Frunzich said the corpses would be disposed of by Armenians belonging to the family of the man who had been hurt in the attempt to stop the car; it would be a kind of personal satisfaction for them, and he assured us that ‘there won’t be so much as a cross over those dogs’.

Frunzich wasn’t his usual humorous, cheerful self. He was serious, but in a positive way, as if he wanted to show us that he supported us. He didn’t talk much; he brought us some bottles of excellent Armenian cognac.

We drank in silence; I was beginning to feel a heavy, overwhelming weariness.

Gagarin took out the bag with the money and told Frunzich he deserved the reward. Frunzich got up from the table, disappeared into another room and came back clutching a wad of money – five thousand dollars. He put it in the bag with the rest of the money, saying:

‘I can’t give any more because I’m a humble old man.

Please, Gagarin, take it all to Aunt Anfisa and ask her to forgive us all; we’re sinners, wicked people.’

We finished the third bottle in silence, and by the time we left Caucasus it was already dark; I almost fell asleep in the car. A lot of things were spinning round in my head, a mixture of memories and unpleasant sensations, as if I had left behind something unfinished, or poorly executed. It was a sad moment for me; I felt no satisfaction. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened to Ksyusha. It was impossible to feel at peace.

Some time later I discussed this with Grandfather Kuzya.

‘It was right to punish them for what they did,’ I said, ‘but by punishing them we haven’t helped Ksyusha. What still tortures me is her pain, against which all our justice has been useless.’

He listened to me attentively, then smiled at me and said I should retrace the path of my grandfather’s elder brother, go and live on my own in the woods, in the midst of nature; because I was too human to live among men.

I handed the Nagant back to him, but he wouldn’t take it; he gave it to me.

A month or so later we heard that Pavel had been killed, along with three of his men who had participated in the plot against the criminal community. Their executioners had tied them to trees in the park, opposite Tiraspol police station, and hammered nails into their heads.

It was rumoured that the plot had in fact been hatched by the police, in an attempt to weaken the criminal community of our town.

They finally succeeded in doing this five years later, when they set many young criminals against the old ones and sparked off a bloody war. That was the beginning of the end of our community, which no longer exists as it did at the time of this story.

Grandfather Kuzya died of old age three years later, and his death – in addition to other events – caused an upheaval in the Siberian community. Many criminals of the old faith, unhappy with the military and police regime that had been established in our country, left Transnistria and returned to Siberia, or emigrated to far-off lands.

My father went to live in Greece, where he spent five years in prison. He still lives in Athens today.

Old Plum is still alive and still lives in his bar; he has gone deaf, so he shouts when he talks. His granddaughter, the one who made the best apple cakes in town and who was a good friend of mine, married a nice guy who sells accessories for personal computers, and together they went to live in Volgograd.

Uncle Fedya was strongly opposed to the advent of the government regime in Transnistria: he put up a stubborn resistance, trying as hard as he could to persuade the criminals to fight, but eventually he gave up and went to live in Siberia, in a small village on the River Lena, where he continues to perform his role as a Saint.

Barbos, meanwhile, has become a very important person in the criminal community: he made a deal with the police and now holds enormous power in our town. In fact, Black Seed is the only caste that is protected by the police. They are hated by everyone else, but no one can do anything about it. They are in charge now; they control all the prisons and all criminal activities.

In the Georgian community there has been a bloody war with the Armenians, which brought the young to power. They are still at war with them now. Mino was killed in the course of the fighting. He arrived with a gunshot wound at the hospital where his wife had just given birth to a son. He never got to see his baby.

Grandfather Frunzich decided to leave Bender, also because of the war between the Georgians and the Armenians. Like many old men of both those communities, he went to live in his homeland, where now he does some small-scale alcohol trafficking.

Stepan still runs his street kiosk, but no longer sells weapons; the criminals of Black Seed have stopped him, so he now makes his living by selling cigarettes and the occasional batch of counterfeit vodka. His daughter has finished her studies and found a job in an architects’ studio in Moscow. Nixon helps Stepan as loyally as ever; he still hates communists and blacks but has finally made friends with Mel, although to achieve this Mel had to sacrifice his Game Boy.

Mel says, though, that Nixon has grown a lot more white hairs lately and is ageing too quickly.

Gagarin only lived for three years after this story: he was killed in St Petersburg because he had got involved in business with some people who enjoyed the protection of the police and the former KGB. We didn’t hear about his death until later, when a girlfriend of Gagarin’s contacted his parents to tell them he was buried in the cemetery of Ligovo.

Cat moved to southern Russia, where for a while he belonged to the gang of a Siberian criminal who robbed HGVs en route from the Asiatic countries. Then he met a girl from Rostov, a land of Cossacks, and went to live with her in the countryside by the River Don. Officially he is no longer involved in criminal activities; he has three children, two boys and a girl, and goes hunting and does carpentry jobs with his wife’s father and brothers. Mel has been to visit him several times, and on those occasions Cat unsuccessfully tried to persuade Mel to marry his wife’s younger sister.

Grave was arrested in Moscow during the attempted robbery of an armoured van, and sentenced to sixteen years in prison. In jail he killed two people, so was sentenced to life and transferred to the special prison of Ust-llimsk, where he still is. It’s impossible to contact him because of the strict regime at the prison.

Gigit and Besa robbed a number of banks together, then the anti-robbery squad managed to track them down and kept them under surveillance for a while. At that point they fell into an elaborate trap. Acting on information provided by an informer who was being manipulated by the police, Gigit and Besa robbed a certain bank: that same evening, however, they were killed in their room in the Inturist Hotel of the town of Tver by the police, who walked off with the loot. Mel went on his own to bring their bodies home, and buried them in the old cemetery of Bender; hardly any of us went to the funeral – only Mel and a few relatives.

Mel still lives in Transnistria, close to his parents. We chat on the phone now and then. He no longer carries out any criminal activities, because he has no one to work with and can’t manage on his own. For a while he worked as a bodyguard for an Authority from the new generation, but he tired of that. After doing a course, he tried teaching aikido to a group of children, but that came to nothing because he always turned up for lessons drunk. Now he doesn’t do anything; he spends all his time playing on his PlayStation, goes out with the occasional girl and now and then helps someone collect their debts.

Ksyusha never got over it. From the day of the rape she didn’t communicate with anyone; she was always silent, with downcast eyes, and hardly ever went out. Sometimes I managed to coax her out and took her for boat trips on the river, but it was like lugging a sack around with you. Previously she had loved going out in a boat: she would constantly change position, lie down in the bows and trail her hands in the water, lark about, get tangled up in the fishing nets, play with the fish we had just caught, talk to them and give them names.

After the rape she was motionless, limp; the most she would do was stretch out a finger to touch the water. Then she would leave it there and sit watching her hand immersed in the water, until I picked her up in my arms to lift her on to the bank.

For a while I thought she would gradually recover, but she got worse and worse, until she stopped eating. Aunt Anfisa was always crying; she tried taking her to different hospitals, to various specialists, but they all said the same thing: this behaviour was due to her old mental disturbance, and there was nothing to be done about it. At the worst moments Aunt Anfisa gave her vitamin injections and put her on a drip feed to keep her alive.

The day I left the country, Ksyusha was sitting on the bench outside the front door of her house. She was holding her game, the woollen flower, which in Siberia is used as a decorative detail on pullovers.

Six years after this sad story, one night I received a phone call from Mel: Ksyusha had died. ‘She hadn’t moved for a long time,’ he told me. ‘She let herself die, little by little.’ After her death, Aunt Anfisa went to live in the house of a neighbour, who needed someone to help his wife with their children.

I left my country; I’ve been through many different experiences and stories, and I’ve tried to do what I thought was right with my life, but I’m still unsure about many things that make this world go round. Above all, the more I go on, the more convinced I am that justice as a concept is wrong – at least human justice.

Two weeks after we had handed out our own kind of justice, a stranger arrived at our house; he said he was a friend of Paunch’s. He explained to me that Paunch had gone away somewhere and would not be coming back, but before leaving he had asked him to give me something. He handed me a little parcel; I took it without opening it, and out of politeness I asked him in and introduced my grandfather to him.

He stayed in our house until the next day. He ate and drank with my grandfather, talking about various criminal questions: ethics, the lack of education among the young, how the criminal communities had changed over the years, and above all the influence of the European and American countries, which was destroying the young generation of Russian criminals.

I sat near them all the time, and when they emptied the bottle I would hurry down to the cellar to refill it from the barrel.

After our guest had gone I opened Paunch’s parcel. Inside it I found a knife called finka, which means ‘Finnish’, the typical weapon of the criminals of St Petersburg and north-western Russia. It was a used – or, as we say in Russian, ‘worldly-wise’ – weapon, with a beautiful haft made of white bone. There was also a sheet of paper, on which Paunch had written in pencil:

‘Human justice is horrible and wrong, and therefore only God can judge. Unfortunately, in some cases we’re obliged to overrule his decisions.’